Entertainment / Literature / Malapropism: Misusing words to create a comic effect or characterize the speaker as being too confused, ignorant, or flustered to use correct diction. Typically, the malapropism involves the confusion of two polysyllabic words that sound somewhat similar but have different meanings. For instance, a stereotyped black maid in Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes series cries out as she falls into the jungle river, 'I sho' nuff don't want to be eaten by no river allegories, no sir!' Dogberry the Watchman in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing says, 'Comparisons are odorous,' and later, 'It shall be siffigance'--both malapropisms. In Sheridan, we find pineapple instead of pinnacle, and we read in Twain's Huckleberry Finn how one character declares, 'I was most putrified with astonishment' instead of 'petrified,' and so on. The best malapropisms sound sufficiently similar to the correct word to let the audience recognize the intended meaning and laugh at the incongruous result.
Search Google for Malapropism: