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Malaprops
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H.W. Fowler (1858-1933). The King’s English, 2nd ed. 1908.
Chapter I. Vocabulary
MALAPROPS
BEFORE classifying, we define a "malaprop" as a word used in the belief that it has the meaning really belonging to another word that resembles it in some particular....
- 1. Words containing the same stem, but necessarily, or at least indisputably, distinguished by termination or prefix.
- 2. Words like the previous set, except that the differentiation may possibly be disputed.
- 3. Give-and-take forms, in which there are two words, with different constructions, that might properly be used, and one is given the construction of the other.
- 4. Words having properly no connexion with each other at all, but confused owing to superficial resemblance.
- 5. Words whose meaning is misapprehended without apparent cause. The hankering of ignorant writers after the unfamiliar or imposing leads to much of this. We start with two uses of which correct and incorrect examples are desirable: provided, where if is required; and to eke out in wrong senses. Provided adorns every other page of George Borrow; we should have left it alone as an eccentricity of his, if we had not lately found the wrong use more than once in The Times.
- 6. Words used in unaccustomed, though not impossible, senses or applications. This is due sometimes to that avoidance of the obvious which spoils much modern writing, and sometimes to an ignorance of English idiom excusable in a foreigner, but not in a native.
- 7. Simple love of the long word.
We have touched shortly upon some four dozen of what we call "malaprops". Now possible "malaprops", in our extended sense, are to be reckoned not by the dozen, but by the million. Moreover, out of our four dozen, not more than some half a dozen are uses that it is worth any one's while to register individually in his mind for avoidance. The conclusion of which is this: we have made no attempt at cataloguing the mistakes of this sort that must not be committed; every one must construct his own catalogue by care, observation, and the resolve to use no word whose meaning he is not sure of — even though that resolve bring on him the extreme humiliation of now and then opening the dictionary. Our aim has been, not to make a list, but to inculcate a frame of mind.
Erstellt: 2016-08