Friday, February 1, 2013

How’s that again?

My son was playing saxophone in a band onstage behind a girl singer at a Christian concert when she urged the college-aged audience to “get up out of your chairs and give Jesus a standing ovulation.”

My 94-year-old friend Rosemary, who always celebrated her birthday for the entire month of February, died last week and just missed being 95. Her most memorable statement in my opinion occurred last year when she asked our mutual friend Sharon to take her to the mall, saying, “I want to get a manicure and a pedophile.”

A third, truly humorous malapropism would have fit nicely into the post at this point, but I cannot vouch personally for a third, truly humorous malapropism. Here’s one, however, that is true but not nearly as humorous. I was present one Sunday evening in 1967 when Blanche D. of Poughkeepsie, New York, who has probably been dead now for years and years, upon hearing of a church trip that was being planned, asked, “What will it curtail?”

What, indeed?

You cannot make this stuff up.

Perhaps you prefer non sequiturs to malapropisms.

We aim to please and, being us, we shall do it in the form of the following poem, which we did not write but which we have known for years and years:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and no wonder,
All the rest eat peanut butter,
Except Grandma, and she smokes a pipe.

I close by wishing my readers a happy February, no matter how many days it has, who eats peanut butter, or what Grandma smokes. Somewhere, Rosemary is celebrating.

5 comments:

  1. Hm... reminds me - a little old lady of my acquaintance, after the Big Storm in UK back in the eighties, told me in all seriousness that her 'conservative' had blown down... Her Labour candidate must have been made of sterner stuff, perhaps?

    ReplyDelete
  2. We've been watching "All in the Family" episodes and enjoyed Archie's malapropisms.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jinksy, not being British, I'm not sure what the little old lady was trying to say. Conservatory, maybe?

    Snowbrush, the Archie scripts are very funny, I agree, but my examples were not scripted in any way, shape, or form!

    ReplyDelete
  4. And a very Merry February to you too sir! We can all be prone to malopropisms. I love the way people will often confuse "prostate" with "prostrate". Not a mistake you should take lying down!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mr. Y. Pudding, Bangkok: your kind greeting has been received and duly noted. There are only a few things one should take lying down, but we shall not explore the subject further, this being a family-friendly blog and all.

    ReplyDelete

<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

We are bombarded daily by abbreviations in everyday life, abbreviations that are never explained, only assumed to be understood by everyone...