Malapropisms and Portmanteaus 12

As Humpty Dumpty explained, a portmanteau has two meanings packed up in one word. Wade Bradford nails Mrs Malaprop here. She (played by Selina Cadell, pictured) gets mixed up in the schemes of young lovers in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 comedy-of-manners The Rivals, and "often uses an incorrect word to express herself", for example: We will not anticipate the past, our retrospection will now be all to the future. Malapropisms are not just howlers, they improve on the original. Some are due to autocorrupt.

Conspiracy theorists love portmanteaus: sheeple, plandemic, scamdemic, Commiefornia, Brussels bureauprats, Demoncrats.

And some quite sensible people like to use silly names like Tony B. Liar, Keith for Keir Starmer; Orifice for Microsoft Office; Murica, Merkins, Usanians, Drumpf. (Sorry, Americans.)

In 2024 “true stories” are going around starring humans confused between condom and condiment, scrotum and sternum, Polish food and shoe polish, all colours of the rectum. It must be true, I overheard it in the supermarket.

I asked ChatGPT to come up with some malaprops, and this is its best effort: I’m like a kid in a candy storm!

Rich people just put their children in a quiche.
We must create repertoire with our neighbours.
It’s a subconscience decision.
This library is a vast suppository of knowledge.
Her heroic deeds must not be allowed to fade into Bolivian.
He was an armature at the game.
East is East and West is West and never the trains shall meet!

It’s a no-brainier!
The theory of evolution “looks like commie gobbily goop”. (gobbledygook)
I fanatacized about my origins.
The air was punguent.
Caviar emptor! (Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.)
There’s so much evil in the world that we can’t phantom.

Darling, you look particularly ravenous this evening! (ravishing)
I had my operation with local Anastasia. (Probably spellcheck error.)
Post hoc ergo prompter hoc.
Pool closed because of carnivorous.
She wore an orchid pinned to her shoulder as a croissant. (corsage)
He was a wolf in cheap clothing! (sheep's clothing, from one of Aesop's fables)
Have you met my magnificent other?
I’m a social piranha! (for pariah)
They were a tilted family.
Our soup is made from locally sourced indigents. (Ingredients – indigents are poor people.)


Why do 'intense' or 'disorder' have to be despective? I love intensity and I definitely am disorder. (@adhdult)

Amazing smell of harpsichord! (Architectural writer John Grindrod as it rains heavily for the first time in months – he means "petrichor".)

Marjorie Taylor Greene called a Petri dish a “peach tree dish.” She also called Gestapo the “gazpacho.” (@DashDobrofsky)

I don’t understand these alfalfa males. (@PearlsFromMyrna)

Get obtuse all you like, it is what kids are taught at a very young age. It’s called false endocrination! (@JasonSt46700879. He means something like: Disguise it all you like, kids are taught that humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor.)

Artists don't have much chance against the gamekeepers /curator's. We used to moan about critic's but they only beat you around the head. Curator's sufficat you. (@cloonconra. May be a typo for gatekeepers, but I like “the gamekeepers of art”. And that's "suffocate".)

The world is in a terrible state of chassis. (Playwright Sean O’Casey, attrib.)

It’s what I call Mary Berry food rather than Chateau de Foie Gras food. (Hotel Inspector, B&B owner)

It’s a thriving, cosmopolitan hubbub. (Martin Roberts on Homes under the Hammer)

Psychic palm and terror card readings: speical offer! By Mrs Eli, Tell past, present and future.

Why is the syncofancy on every BBC channel? (@Pady_oFurniture, sycophancy.)

"I attach a daft translation" I write to someone, with irreproachable professionalism. (@BelgianWaffling)


Say it in American:
impastor
Barochitecture
durbockle (debacle)


Portmanteaus:
diagnonsense
bitchcraft
non-brainary
fivehead (high forehead)
prehab
gentryists
shrinkflation
gundamentalists
mantrums, testeria, HIStrionics
non-brainary
Tescopolis
luminal (luminous and liminal)
cottabunga (Let's build lots.)
moanoglots (people who moan when others speak Welsh on TV)
minocracy (In power in the UK these days.)

Obaminations
invisiclues
Peckerwell (Camberwell and Peckham in South London)
Glostocracy (the elite of Gloucestershire)
tank-thinkers and crankademics (@t0nyyates)
voluntold
tragesty
somnambuscripting (AJB)
hopium
hibernacle
agrannoying (TG)
biografiends (James Joyce)
blanditry (architectural – especially recladding an old building in the latest style)
prosumer
soapnesia (Amnesia conveniently suffered by soap characters. I had a daughter 18 years ago?)
salariat

Malaprops:
decapitated coffee
Vodafone for Voltarol
paralysed milk (pasteurised)
the prime miniature
roast beef and criminalised onion relish
cemeramic, abeautor, defliperator (ceramic, abbatoir, defibrillator – NJ)
longetivity
the placego effect
The Utter Hebrides
suave jacket (It’s “Zouave”.)
tittering on the edge of a precipice
chez longe (How many ways are there of spelling "chaise longue"?)

elemental cheese for Emmenthal
Pigmillion effect for Pygmalion
monothealastic
refinery for finery
conspirituality
Fleabay (AJB)
us lesser morsels (mortals)
Free Plasticine!
Satanizing (sanitising)
spouncering (sponsoring)
opinuated
partisan bakery (artisan)
defunk (defunct)
Mazel Tov cocktails (Molotov)

More here, and links to the rest.

Grammar: Similes, Good and Terrible 10

What was it really like? Try not to try too hard.

The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky, like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. (Cornell Woolrich, The Bride Wore Black. Fortunately his writing is usually pretty plain.

We are prisoners of our belief systems and, if our belief systems are threatened, good evidence peels off our brains like a fried onion off Teflon. (How about “evidence SLIPS off our brains like fried onion off A TEFLON PAN”.)


Not quite hyperbole...

Something comes over writers when they want to mention high cheekbones or cut-glass accents. They frequently get the two confused. If you could grate Parmesan on Joely Richardson’s cheekbones she must have awful skin, poor thing. 

"Joely Richardson (pictured) looks unnervingly similar to her mother, both angular and willowy, with cheekbones that could grate parmesan." Loren Hale has “cheekbones that cut like ice”. Cheekbones that you could cut cheese on. She had cheekbones that could grace the prow of a stealth fighter. (Allegedly from a book called Snow Crash.) Could cut diamonds. Could slice you if you got close enough. Looked as though she’d stuck a clothes hanger in her mouth. Could be seen from a mile away.

Writers also reach for  hyperbole when trying to say that an actor’s performance was wooden. Quora suggests that "the kind description would be to say that the performer gave a studiously understated performance". However, writers tend to invoke Rentokil and the Forestry Commission and tie themselves into knots. Displays all the emotion of a plank of wood, wouldn't be out of place in a forest – these are mild examples.

And the same goes for scene-stealing and scenery chewing. "A common term for a scene where an actor's acting so damn hard that they're picking bits of scenery out of their teeth for days." (tvtropes.org) "It's time to wolf down the scenery like there's no tomorrow." "No scenery was actually harmed in the making of this movie." If you know of a better periphrasis, do let me know.


It’s extremely time consuming and most of the time it's like remonstrating with woodworm. (Simon Hicks)

My mother, clearly instilled with images of us all floating through the Alps, gave us Nimble once. Only once. It was like eating fog. (@ronmanagernottm)

Young Labour are paper dolls living in a house of cards. (@blackbirdpeeja, paraphrase)

A man 'realising he's a woman', whether after a fancy dress party or not, is on a level with my own realisation that I'm a small village in Cornwall with spectacular sea views. (@PhilBur69397549)

The only department store that appears to be still punching above its weight is Selfridges, but increasingly it looks like a beautiful, bejewelled buckle on a tatty leather belt covered in jelly-coloured paste. (Dylan Jones in the Evening Standard. By “paste” I think he means fake stones rather than jam. How about "looks like a genuine gold buckle on a rhinestone belt"?)

He responded with a silent look of horror and revulsion as if I had just told him I wanted to wear his face as a mask and go on a stabbing rampage. (Youtube commenter)

Starmer hints at baby steps to improve the current Brexit deal. RW media descend like swarms of angry wasps.  (@edwinhayward)

Stop being disappointed when a celebrity folds like a cheap lawn chair over the cult ideology. (@blackbirdpeeja)

They go round and round in circles like a bluebottle with one wing. (Joolz Denby, paraphrase)

God bless how stupid men are about make up. It's like watching a gerbil grapple with long division. (@JustRowena)

Maigret is driven from one suspect to another like a pachinko ball.

Like frost in sunshine, your sins will melt away. (Ecclesiasticus)

Sometimes 22 Bishopsgate looks like a glacier mint and sometimes “like a grey Mars Bar”. (Bob Hoskins)

Patricia Highsmith’s self-designed house was like a “run-down municipal swimming pool”. (Charlotte Mendelson, Times 2023)

The bewildering poetry of the King James Bible... has likewise been replaced by modern verses of stunning blandness, each one more like a brochure for council services than the last. (Jemima Lewis, 2023)

I felt like the tail-end of a misspent life. (Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair)

My sister's puff pastry – like eating a wet book. (Benny Hill)

Truss delivering that speech with all the charisma of a regional manager announcing a consultation on redundancies. (@entschwindet)

She has the demeanour of a reserve junior spokes-creature for Number 10. (WUR)

As thick as a canteen cup. (@DaiBevan1)

He remembered where he had seen Celia Harland, and when. A picture rose before his eyes, and it seemed to strengthen like a film in a developing-dish as Hanaud continued. (AEW Mason, At the Villa Rose)

Her sound is that of a serpent on the move. (Jeremiah)

Our Government will try to cling to power like super-glued limpets. (Donal Savage)

A new library in Fayetteville is blank on several aspects. It looks like an East German insecticide factory. (@sharp_architect)

Skinny jeans look like an Alaskan gold-miner’s underwear.

He looked as if he had been hastily assembled by a child out of bricks. (Agatha Christie, Nemesis)

I have built a rockery to plant flowers in, so there should be some colour to the place instead of it looking like a non-descript part of the USSR. (Nigel Jarman)

An over-cleared garden is like a “Protestant cemetery”.

I read quite a lot of Judith Butler for my PhD, it's like trying to eat soup with a fork. (@FemmeLoves)

A period of cloying reconciliation worthy of the ending of the sort of cheesy film shown on long coach journeys in Mexico. (Luigi Amara)

More here, and links to the rest.