play malaprops

[Laurence Urdang]

I don't think that items like nasturtiums for aspersions are puns, either.  Nor are they really malapropisms.  In another day, I'd have called them Jane Ace-isms, for Goodman Ace's wife Jane into whose mouth he would put things like, You could have knocked me over with a fender, Don't just sit there like a bum on a log, etc., familiar to old fogies like me who remember 1930s' radio.
  L. Urdang

Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Jesse Sheidlower
Subject: Re: play malaprops
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On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 08:24:36AM -0700, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> from my friend Tim McDaniel in e-mail 6/4/07, about the intelligence
> of penguins:
>
> Sorry to cast nasturtiums on your totemic bird.
>
> i told him i appreciated the play malaprop, and he replied that it
> wasn't original with him, but (he thought) pretty old, possibly from
> the Dowager Duchess of Denver in the Lord Peter Wimsey novels.
>
> i got 76 google webhits (with "similar pages" etc. removed) for "cast
> nasturtiums", 86 for "casting nasturtiums", and 4 for "casts
> nasturtiums", so it has a modest web presence.
>
> Urban Dictionary has "nasturtiums" as "old yorkshire speak, part of a
> phrase", with an example of "casting nasturtiums about" something.
> the "Slang and colloquialisms of the UK" site
> (http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang)
> says
> *cast nasturtiums* _Verb_. To sully a person's reputation. A
> pun on 'cast aspersions'.
>
> it seems to me that "pun" is not quite the right label here, though
> phonological similarity is involved. the relationship is much like
> that in classical malaprops, except that the choice of the wrong item
> is deliberate. so i called it a "play malaprop"; "mock malaprop"
> might be even better.
>
> a little while back, we talked about some similar examples here --
> little mock malaprops from friends and family. unfortunately, i've
> forgotten the examples and can't find them now. anybody recall them?

I don't remember this discussion, but some others that come to
mind are "cast asparagus" for "cast aspersions" (a few exx. in
HDAS, one from Dos Passos), "au reservoir", "horse's ovaries"
(for "hors d'oeuvres"), "Lost Wages" (for Las Vegas), and
"mercy buckets" (for "merci beaucoup").

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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