A cure for language? Malapropisms?
The use of malapropisms is always funny. Until the world turns into one, as it has now rather inconsiderately done without making an appointment. I’d like to not-very-gently explore the use of malapropisms in a wider, more annoying way.
I’m doing this to prove a point I really should know better than to try to make.
Dickens invented Mrs Malaprop, the epitome of the misused word in the wrong place. Gerald Durrell has a classic story of an old girlfriend who was dropping clangers all over her conversation. Malapropisms drip from the most improbable people and other vacant areas.
Obviously, this isn’t enough. We need to descend into the abysmal bowels of expression, wading in the fetid horrors of vacuous viviparous vagrant vilified vocabularies. (There was this sale on “v’s”, see…)
In this way we can abolish any sort of rational meaning whatsoever, so people can really understand what they’re talking about. It’s already well under way. Consider the civilized conversation of the early 21st century malapropisms, without the smells:
“Dud yew saw thud shew? Showering whit herpes if yew dozen flush yore farce?”
“Youth, Ur dud. Id whizz fussy-neutering.”
As you can see, this too-efficient use of words soon becomes like the financial news or IT articles- Full of things you really don’t want to even think about. The net effect of this high level of articulation is supposed to be excellent. There is absolutely no possibility of any sort of interest in anything.
It’s hard to spread disinformation when nobody cares what’s being said about anything. So it follows that malapropisms will save humanity from both the world and use of language.
A cure for language?
Is this the way to a better world, where they-folk-critters may grovel in delightful sycophantic squalor without having to worry about the terrible risk of relevance which language may create? Will humanity finally escape relevance altogether? Will success spoil the US education system?
Language is a troublemaker. It expects you to keep track of words, sometimes even whole sentences, and you can’t get insurance if it accidentally happens to you. It lurks in the most unlike places, like friends and family. It leaps out at you at work. It even expects you to use it and take it for perverted walks inside the finely splintered minds of the people you speak to.
Clearly, it must be stopped. By cunning, superfluous use of the famous “Words what do things” aka malapropisms, we may avoid the immoralities of language. Thus shall we return to a pastoral existence in which even a bored blade of grass wouldn’t dare bother to start a conversation with humanity.
The “Words what do things” are sub-tool and varicose. They err used to premeditate interest in other subjects. The theory is that whatever the subject, the “Words what do things” will create a sudden desperate desire to think of something else.
Fur sample:
I’ve taken up management science lechering. The herdience* is very dispersive. They find words and build huts out of them. I stand on the stooge, and they take in every shudder of inflection and meaning.
*(Mispronunciation is permitted among consenting adults and bricks which can’t run away or throw themselves at the speaker.)
About ten minutes of this sort of speech, in a rational species, would cause immediate self-extinction. In Homo Sap, it’ll take a few million years, but it will be worth it.
