part of the wordplay to the clue of 20d, prompted me to take a trip down memory lane. I reminisced about my days when I was in my late teens and studying English literature as one of the subjects for graduation. I came across words like spoonerism, malapropism, hamartia, nemesis etc for the first time and found them absolutely enthralling! Other than spoonerism, I would like to discuss malapropism, too. A spoonerism is a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect. It is named after the Oxford don and ordained master, William Archibald Spooner, who was notoriously prone to this mistake. I now learnt from the net that The Oxford English Dictionary recorded ‘spoonerism’ in 1900 and the word was well established by 1921, both well before Spooner’s death in 1930. Although Spooner got the credit, spoonerisms of a different variety were already in use as early as the sixteenth century in France. At that time, there lived in France a writer by the name François Rabelais. In his novel Pantagruel, he wrote, “Il n’y a qu’une antistrophe entre femme folle à la messe et femme molle à la fesse” in which one can clearly see the transposition of the words “femme folle à la messe et femme molle à la fesse“. These are known as contrepèteries. There are a lot many contrepèteries as there are a lot many spoonerisms. However, the best of the spoonerisms according to me is “You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain.” Well, one can easily decode the transpositions. On the other hand, a malapropism is the blundering use of a word that rhymes with, or sounds like, the original word. ‘The Rivals’ of Sheridan was one of the plays that I had to study for the bachelor degree course. A fictional character, Mrs. Malaprop is in that comedy of manners. Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks by using words which do not have the meaning that she intends but which sound similar to words that do. Sheridan chose her name in humorous reference to the word ‘malapropos’, an adjective or adverb meaning ‘inappropriate’ or ‘inappropriately’, derived from the French phrase mal à propos, which literally means ‘poorly placed’. The first person known to have used the word ‘malaprop’ specifically in the sense of a ‘speech error’ is Lord Byron in 1814. Some of the celebrated malapropisms spoken by Mrs. Malaprop are “Illiterate him quite from your memory”, “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile”, “He is the very pineapple of politeness” and “Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!” If not malapropisms, the sentences would have had the actual words like obliterate, alligator, pinnacle, apprehend, vernacular and epithets respectively.
Daily Telegraph 30341