malapropism – מילון אנגלי-אנגלי
malapropism
n.
absurd misuse of words, confusion of words which have a similar sound but a different meaning (for example: malaprop)
Malapropism
A
malapropism (also called a
malaprop or
Dogberryism) is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound (which is often a paronym), resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous
utterance. An example is this statement by baseball player
Yogi Berra: "
Texas has a lot of
electrical votes," rather than "
electoral votes." Malapropisms also occur as
errors in natural speech and are often the subject of media attention, especially when made by politicians or other prominent individuals. The philosopher
Donald Davidson has noted that malapropisms show the complex process through which the brain translates thoughts into language.
malapropism
Noun
1. the unintentional misuse of a word by confusion with one that sounds similar
(synonym) malaprop
(hypernym) misstatement
Malapropism
(n.)
A grotesque misuse of a word; a word so used.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), edited by Noah Porter.
About
malapropism
Synonyms and related words:
Irish bull, abuse of terms, acrostic, alliteration, allusion, amphibologism, amphiboly, anacoluthon, anadiplosis, anagram, analogy, anaphora, anastrophe, antiphrasis, antithesis, antonomasia, apophasis, aporia, aposiopesis, apostrophe, barbarism, bull, calembour, catachresis, chiasmus, circumlocution, climax, conversion, corruption, ecphonesis, emphasis, equivocality, equivoque, exclamation, fluff, folk etymology, gemination, grammatical error, hypallage, hyperbaton, hyperbole, hypercorrection, hyperform, infelicity, inversion, irony, jeu de mots, litotes, logogram, logogriph, malaprop, marrowsky, meiosis, metagram, metaphor, metonymy, misconstruction, mispronunciation, missaying, misusage, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, palindrome, paregmenon, parenthesis, paronomasia, periphrasis, personification, play on words, pleonasm, preterition, prolepsis, pun, punning, regression, repetition, sarcasm, simile, similitude, solecism, spoonerism, syllepsis, symploce, synecdoche, ungrammaticism, wordplay, zeugma
Source: Moby Thesaurus, which is part of the
Moby Project created by Grady Ward. In 1996 Grady Ward placed this thesaurus in the public domain.
