Of course, malapropisms existed long before Mrs. Malaprop appeared. Sometimes they are called Dogberryisms after a sort of policeman character called Dogberry who made the same sorts of mistakes as Mrs. Malaprop—and Dogberry appeared in a play by William Shakespeare that was written almost 200 years before The Rivals.
Malapropisms have been around as long as people have been speaking and writing and making mistakes (as we all do from time to time). They’re often found in the conversations of small children, who hear lots of new words each day. Sally Brown from Charles Schulz’s cartoon strip Peanuts talks about some cavemen who are “suddenly attacked by a huge thesaurus”; and the babies in the television cartoon Rugrats say things like: “Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bread ”and “For feet’s sake!”
But Mrs. Malaprop’s spirit lives on in grown-ups, too. Dorrie Evans, a favorite character in the long-running 1970s Australian soap opera Number 96, was a kind of modern-day Mrs. Malaprop, with remarks like: “Pardon me for protruding” (intruding) and “Life is not a bowl of cherubs” (cherries). And in the TV comedy Kath and Kim, both mother and daughter are constantly coming out with things like: “I don’t want to be rich. I want to be effluent” (affluent), or “The ozone diet? What does that pacifically (specifically) entail?” In fact, they are so well-known for this you will now sometimes find malapropisms called Kath and Kimisms.
What makes malapropisms so funny? Well, the Austrian psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud believed that the mistakes we make in speech (sometimes known as “Freudian slips”) tell us a lot of truth about ourselves—more, in fact, than when we say everything correctly. So perhaps we laugh because we are shocked by the sudden truths a malapropism reveals . . .
Hmm. Next time you write a story or a play, why not try livening it up with a few malapropisms? In the meantime, see if you can work out what’s not quite right about the sentences on the following page.
Malapropisms
1. An amphibious person can write with both hands.
2. Stop being such an idiom!
3. She was rushed to the hospital with a bad case of ammonia.
4. The old man with gray hair looked very extinguished.
Pen Names
Have you ever read a book by Theodor Geisel? No? I bet you have. I’ll give you a hint, there’s this story about a cat with a hat . . .
Aha! Of course—Dr. Seuss. But Dr. Seuss wasn’t the name he was born with. It was his pen name, a name a person uses when he publishes a book. This is also known as a pseudonym, Greek for “false name,” or a nom de plume,which is French for “name of pen.” In Theodor Geisel’s case, Seuss was his middle name. He began using it when he was a young man, drawing and writing for a university magazine. Later, he added the “Dr.” for fun, in honor of the doctoral degree he never managed to get at the university.
So why didn’t he just use his own name in the first place? Well, sometimes writers want to use a different name for different kinds of writing. The mathematics professor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson used the pen name Lewis Carroll when he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, because he wanted to keep his real name for his books about mathematics and philosophy. It was the same for Daniel Handler, a writer for adults, when he decided to use a pen name for his series of unfortunately eventful children’s books. You know who I mean . . . Lemony Snicket.
There can be all sorts of other reasons for using a pen name. The French novelist Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote under the pen name Bauchard during World War II to trick his enemies. The Irish writer Oscar Wilde used the name Sebastian Melmoth after he came out of prison, because he thought that people might be prejudiced against him. And the playwright Molière took on this one-word name so his family wouldn’t be embarrassed (in those days people didn’t think the theater was a respectable place to work). His real name was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin.
Some female writers have written under pen names too, either because they wanted to keep their privacy, or because they were afraid that people didn’t think women should write books. This happened a lot in the nineteenth century. Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice, wrote all her novels anonymously, without any name on them at all. (Now that’s shy!) And one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, George Eliot, was actually a woman named Mary Ann Evans. The wonderful Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson was really named Ethel Richardson, just as fellow writer Miles Franklin’s real first name was Stella.
It can work the other way as well—a man might choose to write under a woman’s name. The author of The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, also used the names Laura Bandcroft and Edith Van Dyne. He must have wondered exactly who he was sometimes . . .
It’s not surprising, when you think about it, that authors like to use pen names. After all, it comes naturally to a writer to make up characters. It’s fun and exciting to become another person for a while—like being an undercover agent! The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard sometimes signed his books John of Silence. Hmm, that gets me thinking. How about Elspeth of Imagination or Ali the Ambidextrous or . . .
What pen name would you use, snoops? You could try using an anagram of your own name. That’s what the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, did—he wrote articles under the name H. A. Largelamb, a pen name he made up for himself as a child. Or you could just let your imagination go wild! Here are a few nutty pen names of some very respectable authors, just to give you some ideas.
Michael Angelo Titmarsh
C. J. Yellowplush, Esq.
Miss Tickletoby
(Real name: William Makepeace Thackeray,
author of Vanity Fair)
Malachi Malagrowther
Captain Clutterbuck
Crystal Croftangry
(Real name: Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe)
Isaac Bickerstaff
A. Dissenter
M. B. Drapier
(Real name: Jonathan Swift,
author of Gulliver’s Travels)
Hmm, the Word Snoop. Do you think that could possibly be a pen name . . . ?
Uh-oh, Word Snoops, we’re up to the second to the last code! (Will you miss them when they’re gone?) See how quickly you can figure this one out. (Hint: How well can you count?)
WHO AM I?
MY FIRST IS IN WALRUS
MY SECOND IS IN DOLPHIN
MY THIRD IS IN PORCUPINE
MY FOURTH IS IN GANDER
MY FIFTH IS IN GOATS
MY SIXTH IS IN PIT-PONY
MY SEVENTH AND EIGHTH ARE IN COCKATOO
MY NINTH IS IN RED SHRIMP
Answers
SPOONERISMS
1. It’s pouring rain outside.
2. That’s a pack of lies!
3. Would you like a bowl of salad?
4. I don’t have time to do my chores.
5. Do you live on this block of houses?
6. Bye all!
MALAPROPISMS
1. An ambidextrous person can write with both hands.
2. Stop being such an idiot!
3. She was rushed to the hospital with a bad case of pneumonia.
4. The old man with gray hair looked very distinguished.
Dear Snoops,
We are now coming to the end of
this book (phew!) and (sob!).
By now you will have noticed that many of the
words we’ve been snooping on together are very
old—even thousands of years old. But this last
adventure into the world of texting and Internet
languages is far newer—or is it?
Probably by the time this book is published,
some of the things I’m going to write about here
will no longer be true. That’s how it is with
words. As soon as you think you understand
what’s going on, it all changes. Words jump and
run and cartwheel around like a gang of spider
m
onkeys. You can hardly keep your eye on one
before another one is leaping around and doing
something different altogether.
But U kp rdn itz bn gr8!
Da Werd Snewp
10.
Back to the future
Telegramese
First, to go back in time . . .
I know, I know—I said this was going to be about new things. But there’s just a little bit of history to begin with.
Many years ago (like more than 100), there were no such things as texts or e-mail or even the telephone. If you wanted to send someone far away a short message very fast, you had to put a letter in an empty bottle and throw it in the ocean . . .
Ha ha! Only joking. :-)
I’ll start that again. If you wanted to send someone far away a short message very fast electronically,you had to use something called a telegram. This was usually done at the post office. You would tell the person at the post office what you wanted to say and they would type it into a machine, which would send the message electronically to another post office anywhere in the world.
Now, in a telegram you paid for each word, so to save money you used as few words as possible. As a result, a very short way of saying things developed, known as telegramese. In some ways it was like the brief writing we use in mobile phone text messages today. Have a look at this telegram that the Word Snoop’s great-grandmother received on her 113th birthday, from her favorite grandson, Alyosha:
Just like in a text message, you can see that Alyosha tried to keep the message short by leaving out words he might have put in if he’d been writing a letter. You can also see that, unlike text messages, telegrams were printed in CAPITAL LETTERS, which meant it looked like you were SHOUTING, and the word STOP was used for a period. You could include other punctuation if you wanted to, but a single mark cost the same as a single word, so people rarely did.
Okay, so both telegrams and text messages are short, but the big difference between the two is that millions of texts are sent around the world every day, whereas telegrams were mainly kept for special occasions. This meant that unlike the ever-changing, ever-developing language of texting, telegramese remained pretty much the same.
It’s funny—even though nowadays with the Internet and mobile phones there’s no real need for telegrams anymore, people still seem to like them and you can still send a telegram from the post office if you want to.
Or a gorillagram if you really want to . . .
Singing telegrams
When telegrams began 100 years ago, they were mainly used to communicate bad news—that is, to say that someone was sick or had died. So when the telegram boy arrived at the door, most people thought “Uh-oh.” To encourage people to think of telegrams as happy things, singing telegrams were invented in the 1930s. A delivery boy would come to your door and sing a message, usually for someone’s birthday or a wedding.
It must have been quite hard sometimes. Try singing this telegram that Alyosha got back in reply from my great-grandmother:
Texting, LOL, Leet and More
Can you read this? If you send a lot of text messages through your mobile phone, I’m sure you can. If not, it probably looks pretty peculiar. Many people (well, let’s face it, adults) look at text messages and think: “Hey, these kids don’t know how to spell or write.” But it’s a lot more inventive than that.
The words in text messages have a lot in common with the words you find in Internet slang and Internet languages, like LOL (Laugh Out Loud) or Leet, or other ways people communicate through the computer or game consoles. Although it seems very new and modern, quite a lot of the tricks of this sort of writing have actually been around for years—centuries, even. Have a look for yourself:* leaving out vowels (a, e, i, o, u), like bn for “been” or fst for “fast.” Well, remember originally the alphabet had no vowels.
* changed or shortened spelling, usually so the word is written as it’s spoken, like cud for “could” or vzt for “visit.” People have been wanting to change spelling like this for ages.
* using little punctuation and few capital letters, like wnt 2 go 4 pza. Well, in the beginning English didn’t use either of these things anyway.
* using numbers or letters that sound like words instead of the word itself. So B4for “before” or L8for “late,” CU for “see you.” That’s something as old as the hills—remember the rebus?
* acronyms, like ttyl for “talk to you later” or bff for “best friends forever.” Even the ancient Romans used acronyms.
* clipping words, either at the beginning, like lo for “hello,” or at the end, like rad for “radical.” We all use plenty of words like this already—just think of bus for “omnibus” or pop for “popular.”
* deliberate mistakes, like changing the grammar to make the text shorter, like i r for “I am”; or typing “own” as pwn on purpose, instead of by accident.
So as you can see, it’s the technology, the way the messages are sent, rather than the language that makes it so new. But it has given rise to some new forms of writing. Text poetry, for example. After all, the shortness of text messages calls for very concentrated ideas and images, rather like the traditional Haiku poetry of Japan. Works of Shakespeare and Dickens and even the Lord’s Prayer have all been turned into text language. And now novels written entirely in instant messaging have started to appear, such as ttyl and ttfn by Lauren Myracle—maybe you can find them in the library. Or why not try writing a text story or poem yourself?
In the meantime, can you work out what popular folk song the Word Snoop has “translated” into text?
Twinkle, twinkle ltl (*),
how I 1Dr wot UR. ^ abof d wrld so hI,
lIk a diamond n d sky.
Twinkle, twinkle ltl (*),
how I 1Dr wot U R.
Smileys
I’m sad to say we’re almost at the end of this book. But I’m glad to say we’re finishing with something happy—smileys. (See, you’re smiling already!)
A smiley is a symbol you create by using the punctuation marks on the keyboard to make messages without words. The most common is the happy face (“smiley,” get it?) made up of a colon and a bracket. It looks like eyes and a smiling mouth if you turn your head sideways (don’t hurt your neck . . .).
Some people like to put in a hyphen for the nose.
Okay, turn your head back the right way now.
The smiley started off in e-mails, to show that something was a joke (or at least not meant to be taken too seriously). Some people find that it’s hard to express emotions in written words alone, and so a smiley can take the place of tone of voice or the look on a face. If you got a message like this, for example:
PLZ COME NOW
you might think the person was saying crossly, ‘“Get here at once!” whereas what they really wanted to say was:
In other words, “Pretty please, I really really want you to come over now, pleeeeeease.”
The happy face was just the beginning—very quickly dozens of other symbols started appearing, like:
They’re all generally called smileys (or sometimes emoticons), even if they’re not smiling. Look on the Internet—you’ll find hundreds of them, as many as there are human feelings. There are different ones for different languages, and new ones being made up all the time. You’ve probably made up a few yourselves!
Half the fun is making them up, and the other half is trying to interpret them, to understand what they mean. Here, have a quick smiley test—what do you think these could mean?
Well, now that we’ve come to the end of the book, I suppose it could mean that I’m surprised, or want to kiss you, or that I’m very very angry, but really I’m just:
crying because the time has come to say . . .
Adieu! from the Word Snoop . . .
This is our very last code, Word Snoops. (Sob!) I had better make it a hard one. (Hint: I think you’re going to need your mobile phone.)
2.3 6.3 6.2 4.1 7.3 2.
1
8.1 8.2 5.3 2.1 8.1 4.3
6.3 6.2 7.4!
Dear Snoops,
This really is now the end of the book and the
end of my secrets (not ALL my secrets, mind
you, but quite a few of them). Just think of all
the strange things we’ve explored together on the
way. From anagrams and acronyms to tautologies
and tongue twisters, eponyms and exclamation
marks—and our journey has really only just
begun. There are so many astonishing things to
discover about words, I don’t think you could
ever come to the end of the secrets they hold.
My dear snoops, I’ve had a wonderful time
with you all. But I’ve been sitting at my desk
typing away for so long, I’m eager to travel
forth again into the wonderful wordy world
and make some new discoveries!
The Word Snoop Page 9
