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Creative Mistakes Can Lead to Lively Writing

By Roy Peter Clark

We all confuse words from time to time, sometimes when we speak them and sometimes when we hear them. We have slips of the lips -- and of the ear. For historical and literary reasons, we call the first a "malapropism" and the second a "mondegreen."

Not long ago, I heard a woman at a fundraising dinner speak fervently about the need to wipe out "prostrate" cancer, when she meant "prostate." I suppose she could have said that we would "prostrate prostate cancer in our time."

With that flip of the tongue, that fundraiser spoke in the tradition of Mrs. Malaprop, a character in  Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play "The Rivals." Although playwrights such as Shakespeare had used this satirical technique much earlier, it was Mrs. Malaprop who lent her name to the habit with utterances such as "He is the very pineapple of politeness," when she meant "pinnacle."

The tradition continues. The website fun-with-words.com offers this list of "genuine" malapropisms from across the Internet:

• He had to use a fire distinguisher.
• Dad says the monster is just a pigment of my imagination.
• Isn't that an expensive pendulum round that man's neck?
• Good punctuation means not to be late.
• He's a wolf in cheap clothing.
• Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel.
• My sister has extra-century perception.
• "Don't" is a contraption.

But what happens if a character in a play says "pinnacle" and we hear "pineapple" or "Pingpong table"? That mishearing of a lyric or pronouncement carries the funny name "mondegreen," which turns out to be an example of what it signifies. The word comes from a Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" that goes, "They laid him on the green," which was misinterpreted as "Lady Mondegreen."

Think of how many times you've misunderstood the lyrics of a popular song, a phenomenon described in the book "'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy," a corruption of Jimi Hendrix's lyrics from "Purple Haze," which really said, "'scuse me while I kiss the sky." Or, from the Beatles song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds": "the girl with colitis goes by" instead of "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes." The rock classic "Louie, Louie" was banned in Boston when horny teens and puritanical parents both misheard the lyrics as obscene.

When I first became a writing teacher, someone handed me a long list of student mistakes, many of them malapropisms or misreadings of standard phrases. Whether these were real or not, I do not know -- and I thought them disrespectful to struggling students -- but they were hilarious: "She tilted her head with a slight air of expectoration." Quick, Mildred, grab the spittoon!

In the right context, that sentence would be considered a brilliant play on words and not an embarrassing mistake, which is why I save the malapropisms of children. They can contain a kind of innocent wisdom, and you never know when they can be unearthed, transforming the naive into joie de vivre, as when my young niece Mary Hope declared that something she saw was just "an obstacle illusion."

It is crucial for the reader or writer to distinguish an intended double meaning (rendered either by an author or through a character) from an Archie Bunker-style gaffe, as when he encouraged his wife Edith to go to the "groinacologist" to help cure her of her "mentalpause." That's a lot different from Hamlet encouraging the dear Ophelia to get herself to a "nunnery," a brilliant play on a word which could mean convent or brothel.

One of the delights of writing a World War II profile of my old friend Tommy Carden was capturing his distinctive use of language, including his creative mistakes.

When the army in the south of France discouraged troops from "fraternizing" with the local mademoiselles, Carden ignored the warning with impunity. The word "fraternizing" turned out to be a little bit above his grade level, so he made it his own, declaring himself to be an expert in "flatternization" with the ladies.

Please share your own creative mistakes, or a famous language flip you have heard or read.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on June 09, 2010 (boomark / email).