Lou Malaprop.....no threesomes thank you!

While I do guffaw merrily at a well constructed or unconscious malapropism, I am embarrassingly prone to them myself. Luckily, I don't often speak in public unlike Rachida Dati, whose slip of the tongue was reported widely.... Fnarr! Fnarr! Laura Barton of the Guardian writes...'Seriously now, who hasn't ever confused oral sex with inflation? It seems a little excessive to force French MEP to make a public apology for the gaffe she made on national radio. Discussing overseas investment funds profiteering during economic uncertainty, she told the interviewer: "I see some of them looking for returns of 20 or 25%, at a time when fellatio is almost non-existent." Dati blamed speaking quickly for the stumble ("inflation" is perilously close to the French word "fellation", you see).' An easy mistake, surely and actually I wish my French was as good as her English.

For years our family prayer, said pre-dinner, was ruined by my sister, brother and me ...

'O Lord, Bless us, Bless this meal...'

OK till now...

'Bless those who have repaired it and give food to the hungry. Amen'

..... ooops, although this was occasionally accurate if you were served the leftovers for a third day running.

Whether it be a mini-Malaprop or merely a faux-pas, I remember regularly exclaiming to my friends during my teens that I was absolutely ravishing.
'That may be the case,' corrected an elder one day,
'......but is it the case that you are also famished?.....'
......Took a while for penny to drop.

In both Corfu and on the Greek mainland where I lived and worked for a while in the '80s, I created my own Malaprop: 'Kαλή νύχτα' pronounced cahlee-neet-ah means goodnight in Greek. I rather liked teaming the Kαλή part of the word with a new word I learned for bats. To me the beginning of the word for bats, νυχτερίδες (nychterídes) sounded very like νύχτα (neet-ah,) if you said it quickly enough. So I went about the place bidding 'good bats' to all the good folk. It soon caught on, even with the locals, especially after a couple of glasses of Ouzo. Confused? Well, I think you had to be there...

A family tale, whether true or not who can tell, has been relayed for many years through our generations. The setting is a wedding where the bride comes from a country family of simple means and the groom, a doctor, comes from an affluent family. An elderly aunt on the wife's side was asked by the mother of the groom why her husband wasn't at the wedding.
'Oh it's dreadful,' the aged lady replied. 'He's slipped his dick.'

If you've ever read A Wayne in a manger by Gervase Phinn, I'm sure you'll chuckle again at the tale of a small schoolboy insisting that the name of the baby in the Christmas Story is Wayne.
'His name is not Wayne,' his teacher corrected...
'Is too,' replies the young boy. 'We sing it every year; A Wayne in a Manager no crib for his bed!

Maybe such brilliance should never be corrected.

My latest gaff is displayed for all to see in various locations in Shropshire. Today I will drive to all outposts to retrieve said gaffs, replacing with the correct spelling of the word manège. I will do this just in case the good people of Shropshire think I'm advertising a threesome in an arena filled with sand!