I’m sure some of you know the definition of a malaprop. If not, here it is. A malaprop is the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar sounding one, often with unintentional amusing effect. I really didn’t know the definition or the word myself but while posting yesterday I noticed two entries that amused me. After digging around in my books I discovered the term malaprop and a number of examples I thought you might find interesting and hopefully amusing. Here they are . . .
Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope.
Although the patient had never been fatally ill before, he woke up dead.
William Tell shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.
The book was so exciting I couldn’t finish it until I put it down.
The difference between a king and a president is that king is the son of his father and a president isn’t.
The four seasons are salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar.
The Magna Carta provided that no freemen should be hanged twice for the same offense.
Most of the houses in France are made of plaster of Paris.
The spinal column is a long bunch of bones. Your head sits on the top, and you sit on the bottom.
He saw three other people in the restaurant, and half of those were waiters.
Now you know what malaprops are. As I read them, I realized that I’ve seen samples of them many times before but never heard anyone use the term. I’m ambivalent about knowing it now and I’m almost sorry I made you aware of it. I may revisit this subject in the future or maybe not.
After requesting limericks from readers yesterday I really didn’t expect too much of a response. Much to my surprise at 1:15 am I received the following limerick from an anonymous reader. The email was a one liner, “Here’s my favorite feminist limerick.” And here it is just as received:
There was young lady of Wheeling
Who professed a lack of sexual feeling.
But a cynic named Boris
Just touched her clitoris,
And she had to be scraped off the ceiling.
I love anything that makes me laugh out loud and this limerick did. I’m not sure who exactly emailed it, but it has a definite female feel. What do you think?
And to end this post on a fun note, a happy yet stupid newspaper headline.
This will be a short and sweet posting today. Spring/Summer has arrived with a huge bang now that the weather has turned warmer. Family obligations come first since they’re mostly about the grand kids anyway. Last evening my better-half and I attended our first little league ballgame to support our grandson. This is a league for 7–9-year-old future all-stars and it’s a real hoot to watch these kids as they try to figure the game out. Most barely know how to swing a bat, let alone having enough arm strength to throw a ball to a base. It’s getting them on the field and teaching them the beginnings of playing as part of a team. This is baseball at its absolute best. There were about 20 kids in their fabulous new T-Shirts, a host of moms and dads and brothers and sisters, and about ten million effing mosquitos to drive us all insane. That visit will keep us both in the good graces of grandson #2.
Grandson #1 will be taking the field in a day or so in a league of older kids. I can’t wait to see him at bat since I was his unofficial batting coach in his younger days. More fun baseball, more black flies, and more mosquitos. Being a baseball fan and a grandparent is almost a full-time job and we both love it.
Unfortunately, the blog will suffer a bit. I may miss a few days here and there but hopefully not too many.
The title of the post tells you everything you need to know. I love wordplay, making puns, finding palindromes, and using words that are rarely heard anymore. Word play can be fun and here are a few fun facts for your files.
Do you know how to tell the difference between morons, imbeciles, and Idiots? Morons – IQ 51 to 70, Imbeciles – IQ 26 to 50, and Idiots – IQ 0-25.
The words tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous are the only four words in the modern English language that end in “dous”.
There are no words that rhyme with orange.
If “off” means to deactivate, what happens when the alarm goes off?
Dr. Seuss is credited with the first use of the word “nerd” in print, from his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo.
The word “Mountweazels” concerns spurious entries or fake words used to catch copyright cheaters.
The term “Tattarrattat” was coined by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses for a knock on the door. It also happens to be the longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary.
“The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep is sick” is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.
These six words have no accepted singular forms. Pajamas, Shorts, Jeans, Tights, Trousers, and Glasses.
“Floccinaucinihilipilification” is the longest real word (29 letters) in the Oxford English Dictionary.
I’ll keep searching for more of these and as I find them, I’ll post them. Language can be fun in so many ways. How cool is it to use the language properly to insult some clueless person who insists on irritating you and them not realizing what you meant.
Poetry is an enigma to me. I wouldn’t know good poetry if my life depended on it and even the bad poetry that I sometimes see doesn’t sound so bad. Anything that confuses me like that makes it impossible for me to take it too seriously. After a recent Bad Poetry Post, I received a few e-mails with samples from some of my readers. I assume they sent them because they thought they were bad, I don’t really know, so you figure it out. I think the first one was sent to me because I’m from Maine and someone thought I might be interested in Moose poetry. Good luck with that one. Here it is . . .
A moose is like a bull on stilts With a silly kind of head. And if one of them sat on you You’d probably be dead.
Do you really think that’s bad poetry? It seems okay to me but nothing special. It’s a little bit of truth with a little bit of silliness. Here’s the next one which I really don’t understand about a Toad. It’s a little weird but kind of funny. It seems more like a limerick than poetry but when you get right down to it there isn’t much of a difference.
The story that is told By a severely flattened toad, Is of evidential failure In attempts to cross the road.
This next poem hits home for me primarily due to my advanced age and secondly because it brings back memories of my favorite grandmother who passed away a very long time ago. See what you think.
💖
Of love and marriage who can say, which way these things can go. A loving wife, a shrieking hag, no one will ever know.
The years of youth have come and gone, with memories good and bad. The happiness of family, the love of mom and dad.
The years should teach you something, or so we’re always told. Remain yourself no matter what, and mellow when your old.
Your life is filled with happiness, and sorrows big and small, But not until your old and gray, will you understand it all.
It is a shame that through the years, this knowledge lies unused. Erring and blundering again and again, with help and advice refused.
So, think about the elder ones, grandmothers, grandfathers and such, Who’ve experienced life’s many problems, and could help you oh so much.
Their days are few in number, and once their gone it’s sad. Accept their help and listen close, to the experiences that they’ve had.
And when they’ve gone, you’ll think of them the way they used to be. The memories are all you have, but that’s enough you see.
Today we’ll be introduced to what might be called something less than a romantic love poem. For those of you out there who worship at the steps of classical poetry, I apologize. I like my poetry a little more down to earth and accented with a bit of humor, be it erotic or rude, you decide. This was written some years ago, but it took a long time for me to actually decide to blog it. Anyone who knows me from that time will understand the fun of it, I hope.
As someone who’s crazy for limericks of all kinds, I thought I’d introduce a new contributor to this blog. The name is John Ciardi, and he was a close friend of Isaac Azimov, my favorite limerick author. They partnered up back in the 70’s and wrote a book of their limericks. It was a limerick war between the two as part of their competitive friendship. I’ve blogged many of Azimov’s limericks and I think it’s only fair to give Mr. Ciardi equal time. Here are a few of his gems.
Let me start off by saying that I’m not a beer drinker. I haven’t had much use for drinking beer since my early years of college and even then, I mixed it with Seven-Up because I couldn’t stand the taste. Also, most of the girls wanted it sweetened and who was I to argue? And now I’m living with one of the greatest beer drinkers I’ve ever seen, my better-half. I would easily consider her a professional beer drinker. She knows all the brands, flavors, the history of the breweries, and that makes her an expert in my eyes.
Many years ago, I worked with a man who made her look like an amateur. This guy could sit and drink a half a case of beer, leave the bar, and drive home. I never saw him intoxicated regardless of how many beers he slugged down in the course of the evening. I consistently ragged on him about drinking too much beer because even then I didn’t have much use for it. Finally, he decided to respond to my constant badgering and gave me the list you’re about to read. He felt that I spent most of my time chasing women and that in his opinion beer was way better than women. Here we go, his list of reasons that beer is better than women.
You can enjoy beer all month long.
You don’t have to wine and dine a beer.
A beer will wait patiently for you in the car when you play sports.
Beer is never late.
Hangovers go away, beer never does.
When you go to a bar, you can always pick up a beer.
Beer never has a headache.
A beer won’t get upset if you come home with beer on your breath.
If you pour a beer just right, you’ll always get good head.
A beer always goes down easy.
You always know if you’re the first one to pop a beer.
Beer is always wet.
Beer doesn’t demand equality.
The beer doesn’t care when you come.
You don’t have to wash a beer before it tastes good.
As I was typing this list, I had a small but equally important epiphany. While I dislike beer immensely, I absolutely love bourbon. If I replace the word beer in this list with the word bourbon, it still makes perfectly good sense. I guess it’s true what they say.
Today is DUMB day here in Maine. No, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be DUMB today but all things being considered I might be DUMB tomorrow. This word is used almost as heavily as “shit” and “fuck”. One bad move and you are immediately labeled a “DUMB shit” or a “DUMB fuck”. You may have only made a minor mistake but you’re still painted with a broad brush that identifies you as someone who screwed up in a big way. Our language is not fair and not for the faint of heart. Have you ever heard the term “dumbassary” or how about “shitheadedness”? You can build your own words and introduce them into the lexicon and pray that someone repeats them, that they then catch on, and all of a sudden you’ve been immortalized. People everywhere use the word DUMB and some even attempt to make money from its use. Here are few examples . . .
A 1998 song by the group “Garbage” was named DUMB.
Another group of fine upstanding musicians called “The 411” used it as a song title way back in 2004.
And probably one of the more famous weird bands, “Nirvana”, sang their hearts out in their 1993 In Utero album to the song DUMB. Later found to be highly prophetic when Kurt Cobain, the lead singer, offed himself with a shotgun. And lucky us because of that incident the magical title of celebrity was passed onto the band “Hole” and introduced us to Courtney Love. Really, how DUMB was that?
As flexible as the word DUMB is, the language has also supplied us with dozens of words with DUMB as the underlying meaning. If you hear any of the following words used in describing you in any fashion, the speaker is in fact, calling you a DUMB ass.
So when I state that I am anti-stupid you can see just how busy I’ve really become. It’s an endless battle identifying and pointing out all of the stupid, dumb, and idiotic citizens roaming our streets right under our noses. Fortunately for all of you, I grudgingly volunteered years ago to lead the charge against DUMB and STUPID.
With New Year’s approaching I’ve begun to think about my resolutions for 2015. In preparation for the new list it only makes sense to review last year’s resolutions. It might be necessary to use a few of them that I failed to live up to again this year.
2014
Read five books a month. COMPLETED
Teach the grandson one curse word per month once he begins talking. He still isn’t talking enough to complete this one. FAILURE
Keep the number of F-bombs below 100 a week. COMPLETED
Drink less brandy than last year but more than next year. COMPLETED
Spend less than $300.00 at Dunkin Donut for the entire year ($25.00 per month). . . . as of 12/28/2014 $391.32. BIG FAILURE
Stop dancing naked near the picture window in the living room, it scares the neighbors. I managed to stop the dancing but not being naked seems impossible for me. FAILURE
Fight to my last breath to keep chickens and goats from becoming part of my life. COMPLETED
Four completed out of seven seems pretty good to me but I need to improve that next year. I’d really like just once to complete all of them but I always seem to get sidetracked with other stuff. I may need a few easy ones for 2015 that won’t require me to work so hard. With that thought in mind here is my new list.
I vow to exercise for forty-one minutes every other day for the entire year.
I vow to call President Obama nasty names only during months with an "R" in them.
I further vow to never say anything good about President Obama in months without an "R".
I vow to never blurt out any F-Bombs in front of the grandson now that he has started repeating damn near everything.
I vow to say many more F-Bombs around those people (except the grandson) who irritate, annoy or piss me off.
I vow to stop flirting with just anyone. There are times when I feel like such a slut and that’s not always a good thing for my self esteem.
For the third year in a row I vow not to prance naked anywhere near the front picture window. It creeps out the neighbors and one or two of our regular joggers.
I also vow not to screw with my cat as much this year due to his advanced age and sharp claws.
I vow to take at least 500 really good photographs a month.
I’ll do my first review of these new resolutions sometime in June. Hopefully I’ll be on track to complete every one for the first time. As always the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.
everyuselessthing.com 