- Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation falls into the idiom version a couple of times when he swaps words in common idioms for synonyms, so while he's technically saying words that mean the same thing (and, as one would expect given his literally encyclopedic knowledge of the English language, he's always spot-on as far as accurate synonyms), he completely bungles the idiom, often to the point where it's virtually unrecognizable. For instance, in one episode, he tells Doctor Crusher that he may be "pursuing an untamed ornthoid without cause"note on a wild goose chase and another time suggests that completing a task may require them to "ignite the midnight petroleum"note burn the midnight oil.
- Farscape:
- Crichton's constant use of Earth slang, colloquial expressions, and cultural references is a constant source of annoyance to his crewmates. (One theory is that he just wanted to make them feel as mystified as life in their part of the universe made him feel.) To make him feel at home, some of them decide to try mimicking him.
- D'Argo manages to master some of the more frequent expressions after a period of adjustment ("I'd rather go down on a swing" becomes "I'd rather go down swinging" after enough practice).
- Aeryn, possibly because she's not given to any sort of slang to begin with messes them up whenever she tries ("I'm up with that"; "She gives me a woody" [the intended saying was "willies"]). (Despite actually studying to do it, she also has trouble with English when trying to say it without Translator Microbes: "I'm getting a bad bribe—" "Oh Lord, she's talkin' English!" This could be seen as her continuing her malapropismic habits due to actually trying the language they're in, rather than just trying the actual meaning.)
- There's a lovely example in Terra Firma when Noranti and Rygel are enjoying popcorn and Noranti calls it "cop porn".
- Archie from All in the Family was prone to doing this. He used big words frequently and almost always incorrectly
. - Doctor Who
- NCIS:
- Ziva David does this all the time (which is what earned her a Funny Foreigner nod). Played realistically, in that as time goes on she gets better about it, but still does it even after being in the US for years.
- It's hinted in at least one episode that she does this intentionally to get people to underestimate her.
- Averted in one episode, where she gets an idiom correct, saying "Perhaps we're barking up the wrong tree." Tony then tells her that the correct word to use is "bush," which causes the trope to be played straight, as she proceeds to say "barking up the wrong bush."
- Subverted when she sees McGee with a deep frown and says that he looks "constipated". Tony tells her that the word is "consternated", but Ziva clarifies that she thinks McGee looks like he's blocked up inside.
- Ocassionally exploited for laughs, as in one episode where Ziva says she hit a stone wall in the investigation. She is corrected and told the idiom is brick wall, but she clarifies that she literally hit a stone wall with a car while in pursuit.
- Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. A list of "Rickyisms" can be found here.
- Mike Hamar on The Red Green Show: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and the prostituting attorney..." You'd think he of all people would know how that phrase is supposed to go. He's definitely heard it enough times.
- The mini-series V (1983) had the alien character Willie who was supposed to be sent to Israel, not California, so he's not that proficient at English and does this pretty much all the time.
- This is the favorite (non-Catchphrase related) Running Gag in the Mexican comedy El ChapulÃn Colorado, where the titular superhero ChapulÃn always manages to mix up two proberbs or sayings together. El Chavo del ocho also did this sometimes, complete with prolonged "And what'd I say?" "[X]" "And what's the right way?" "[Y]" sequences. Although, one school episode had Godinez thinking Prof. Jirafales said "sonámbulos" (sleepwalkers) when he asked him "¿Qué son ángulos?" (What are angles?).
- The Sopranos:
- Tony Soprano has a tendency to do this, sometimes taking the words of his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, and completely mangling them.
- "Little" Carmine Lupertazzi is a particularly notorious example, to the point where other characters refer to him as Brainless the Second and exchange confused looks during one of his malapropism-riddled speeches.
Little Carmine: A pint of blood is worth more than a gallon of gold.
Little Carmine: We're in a fucking stagmire.
Little Carmine: You're very observant: the sacred and the propane.
Little Carmine: I give him his present, this mellifluous box.
Little Carmine: There's no stigmata connected with going to a shrink.
Little Carmine: You're at the precipice of an enormous crossroad.
- Also, Paulie Walnuts:
Paulie: That's why dinosaurs don't exist no more.
Paulie's Comà re: Wasn't it a meteor?
Paulie: They're all meat-eaters.
- Nina from Just Shoot Me! often mixes up her sayings. ("A bird in the hand is worth two if by sea." "Entre nous and Frère Jacques...")
- In almost every episode of Home Improvement, Tim Taylor viciously mangled some piece of advice he received from his neighbor Wilson. "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." became "If you teach a young fish to dance, once he gets real old he sticks with you forever." in one episode.
- George Francisco from the Alien Nation TV series, movies, and books is usually involved in the misquote or misuse of a common phrase, probably due to lack of cultural references to situate it properly. (This misuses are known by the fans as "Georgeisms".) In one of the movies, his wife has fallen victim of the trope.
- "Are you implying I am kitty-whipped?!"
- What's great is how his partner Matt Sikes always corrects him, except the time he used one especially mangled idiom ("You look like what the cat dragon ate."), when Sikes just shook his head and let it go.
- Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served? claimed that the primordial ooze had "little orgasms" floating round. She called the Caribbean the "Caribbeano" and "apoplectic" was "apoploptic".
- She's also in the habit of using the words "obstropulus" and "igni-moan-ius"
- Don't forget her being "unanimous" in all her opinions. Technically true, but...
- After the UK's conversion to metric, she told Ms. Brahms that everything was measured in centipedes.
- "But I would ask you to remember that Parliament has passed the Sexual Relations Act, which states that women are just as good at it as men!"
- Mrs. White in the first series of Clue, as played by June Whitfield. She had the tendency to secrete herself behind curtains and be filled with resource after terrible events. Though known to take the occasional nip from a hip flask, she insists she was not a dypsoholic, and is offended the Mr. Baloney and his defectives would insinuate such a thing.
- Emily Litella from Saturday Night Live.
- More recently Al Sharpton, Drunk Uncle, and Anthony Crispino.
- The Woman Who Wish You Never Met At A Party from Weekend Update is also prone to these.
- Also, the former porn stars played by Vanessa Bayer and Cecily Strong.
- Will Ferrell's George Dubya Bush.
Jim Lehrer: Governor Bush, the next question is for you. Two weeks ago, at a meeting of the Economic Club in Detroit, you said the following: "More seldom than not, the movies gives us exquisite sex and wholesome violence, that underscores our values. Every two child did. I will." What did you mean by that?
Bush: [clears throat] Pass.
- Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses does this a lot, with both French and English.
Raquel: [on hearing a story of a wartime romance] It's like Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
Del: [whispering] What's Captain Pirelli's Mandarin?
- The Office (US):
- Michael Scott commonly does all varieties of this, along with his inability to pronounce complicated words.
Michael: Fool me once... strike one. Fool me twice... ... ... strike three.
Michael: I am downloading some N3Ps, for a CD mix tape...
Michael: [sipping wine] That was sort of an oaky afterbirth.
Michael: New York, New York. The city so nice, they named it twice. Manhattan is the other name.
Michael: Well well well, how the turntables...
[...] Pam: Are you serious?
Michael: Yes.
And don't call me Shirley. [...] Michael: If I brought in some burritos or some colored greens or some pad thai. I love pad thai.
Stanley: It's "collard greens".
Michael: What?
Stanley: It's "collard greens".
Michael: No, that doesn't really make any sense. Because you don't call them "collared" people. That's offensive.
[...] Michael: Webster's dictionary defines wedding as "the fusing of two metals with a hot torch." Well, you know something? I think you guys are two medals. Gold medals.
- In a slightly more subtle example, when a saying Michael's using has more than one possible phrasing, he'll often get the saying right, but use the wrong version of it, an example of which being when Michael is comforting Dwight, who had just broken up with a girl, by saying, "You don't deserve her." While those words can be used to mean, "You deserve better," they are usually used to mean the opposite. Kevin is understandably confused, though Dwight actually thanks Michael, presumably understanding Michael's intention.
- Commonly used on 3rd Rock from the Sun. In one episode, Dick is outraged that Mary once posed "naked as a jaywalker". In another, Dick decides to be a normal human being, declaring with an absolute straight face "I am John Q. Pubic!"
- The Canadian sketch comedy show The Vacant Lot featured a sketch involving this trope. Four men playing poker begin arguing over the correct lyrics to the song Blinded by the Light (different interpretations involve douches, loofah sponges, and complete nonsense). When one of them finally gets fed up and totally freaks out, another comments, "Man, somebody's hot under the colander."
- On Pushing Daisies, Emerson Cod has a gag of mixing up necrophilia and narcolepsy.
Emerson: I mix up words that sound alike.
Olive: Oh, me too! I thought for the longest time that masturbation meant chewing your food!
- Kelly of Married... with Children. A fansite has a whole page dedicated to her malapropisms.
- However, there was one notable subversion, where Al went to hold a one-man protest at his old football field; she clearly said she knew exactly what the word meant here:
Kelly: I hope he doesn't make a testicle of himself.
Peg: You mean "spectacle", honey.
Kelly: No, I mean testicle! The spectacle I'm used to.
- Ray Kowalski on Due South has a habit of making these.
- As does Francesca Vecchio, who has a Running Gag of misquoting typical police jargon (for instance, "broiling" a suspect instead of grilling). This is weaponized in one episode, where she eventually drives a suspect into confessing by doing this relentlessly.
- Brennan on Bones graduated from "I don't know what that means" to Malaproper about mid-Season 2.
- Da Ali G Show: The title character, being a complete moron, does this a lot, especially when interviewing extremely respected experts on the subject he's asking about.
- A common sketch on In Living Color! would be a prisoner who would talk in this manner, specifically replacing words with more offensive or sexual ones. Usually you could understand him, except for the first few where it isn't explained what he's talking about. In Season 2, they mix it up by showing him talking to OTHER people like this, including a prison inmate, his son, and Barbara Bush.
- A running gag with Ricky's broken English causing him to misspeak English idioms on I Love Lucy.
- Friends
- In one episode, Joey refers to a "moot point" as a "moo point". He even justifies it: "Yeah, it's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo." (Rachel: "Have I been living with him too long, or does that make sense?")
- When giving an interview to a soap opera magazine, he also described himself as a "Mento" for kids. ("Like the candy?" "Yes, I do, actually.")
- In another episode he refers to his sister and Rachel, who both like fashion, as "fashists".
- In "The One With George Stephanopoulos", Joey confuses "omnipotent" with "impotent".
Monica: Hey, Joey! What would you do if you were omnipotent?
Joey: Probably kill myself.
Monica: Excuse me?
Joey: Hey, if Little Joey's dead, I got no reason to live.
Ross: Uhm, Joey... omnipotent.
Joey: You are? I'm so sorry.
- Phoebe attempts to call Ross out on his jealousy issues by calling him a "crazy, jealous...sycophant". When everyone looks confused she admits she doesn't actually know what "sycophant" means, but she stands by everything else she said.
- In "The One With Unagi", Ross is convinced the eponymous word is a martial arts term meaning "a state of total awareness", regardless of everyone else telling him its a kind of eel used in sushi.
- Similarly in one episode of My Name Is Earl, Ray-Ray and a cop argue with Darnell that the expression is "mute point" because it's not worth talking about.
- Las Vegas has Polly the beautician, a woman who speaks near-perfect English, except with a Korean(?) accent. Problem is, she has no appropriateness filter. Take the time her friend Sam is offered a drink by a cute guy in Traffic school. Polly complains that no one offered to buy her a drink. Quadriplegic Mitch offers to buy her one.
Polly: No thanks. Wheelchair give me bruises.
- Maple LaMarsh on Remember WENN was one of these.
- One Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy does this sometimes: "Something about Kissing Toast..." (Kakistos).
- Psych has a running gag in which Shawn will butcher a figure of speech, Gus will correct him and he'll respond with "I've heard it both ways." Lampshaded, inverted, used randomly by at least one guest star, and the subject of song and dance number by Shawn and Lassiter in the musical episode.
- Much of Peter Kay's humour, showcased in Phoenix Nights but begun by his earlier stand-up act, is based on malapropisms either uttered by Kay's characters or quoted from things he's heard in real life. Some of these, such as "George Formby Grill" and "VD player", have attained Memetic Mutation and even entered slang usage in some circles.
- Kath & Kim (Australian version: no one counts the remake) live this trope. They only want to be effluent.
- The Two Ronnies have a few sketches playing on this. Notably, The Society For The Prevention of Pismronounciation.
- Victorious - In the "Stuck in an RV" episode, Tori berates Jade with a vicious "Thank you, Catherine Obvious." Cue confusion from the other characters. After they correct her, she weakly tries to defend herself by pointing out that Catherine could be a captain.
- Jack on Will & Grace once said that his boss gave him an "old tomato" (either behave more professionally with Karen or fire her):
Will: An 'old tomato'?
Jack: Yeah, when you have to do one thing or the other? You have to eat it or throw it? 'Old tomato.'
Will: Oh, I see. I was confused, 'cause you know, I— I pronounce it old to-mah-o.
- And while watching Ben out-cook him:
Jack: Hmm. Doesn't look like much of a salad to me. Where's the arugula? Hmm? Where's the radicchio? Where's the Rwanda?
Ben: Jack, one of those isn't a salad ingredient so much as a war-torn country in Africa.
Jack: Duh. I sponsor a kid in Arugula.
- Grace also apparently does not know her French terms:
Will: [on selling their flipped apartment] We're in escrow.
Grace: [dismissively] Oh, escrow. What is escrow?
Will: You know what it is. They've already put up the money.
Grace: That's what escrow is? I thought it was something else. ...What's "force majeure"?
- And while counseling Will through a date:
Grace: The two of you are locked in a high stakes, erotic pied-a-terre.
Will: Pas de deux.
Grace: That's what I said.
Will: You said "pied-a-terre." That's an apartment.
Grace: I know, I took Spanish for two semesters.
- On The Big Bang Theory, Raj occasionally confuses the exact wording of American colloquialisms:
Howard: [about Penny and Leonard] Yes, she's pushy, and yes, he's whipped, but that's not the expression.
- They all use difficult ways of saying simple things, especially Sheldon.
- From the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth:
Baldrick: The thing is, the way I see it, these days, there's a war on, right? And ages ago, there wasn't a war on, right? So, there must have been a moment when there not being a war on went away, right? And there being a war on came along. So, what I want to know is: How did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?
Blackadder: Do you mean, how did the war start?
- A bit later:
Baldrick: I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cos he was hungry.
Blackadder: I think you mean, it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot.
Baldrick: No, there was definitely an ostrich involved, sir.
Blackadder: Well, possibly. But the real reason for the whole thing was that it was just too much effort not to have a war.
George: By gum, this is interesting! I always loved history. The Battle of Hastings, Henry VIII and his six knives, all that.
- The Blackadder the Third episode "Ink and Incapability" has Baldrick showing Blackadder "My magnificent octopus (i.e., magnum opus)".
- Also from the same episode:
Baldrick: [After Blackadder essentially calls Samuel Johnson an idiot] That's not what you said when you sent him your navel.
Blackadder: Novel, Baldrick, not navel. I sent him my novel.
Baldrick: Well, novel or navel, it all sounds a bit like a bag of grapefruits to me.
Blackadder: The phrase, Baldrick, is "a case of sour grapes".
- In "Duel and Duality", Prince George says of Blackadder's Swapped Roles plan, "It's just like that story, 'The Prince and the Porpoise.'"
- Subverted in "Chains":
Elizabeth: They've simply vanished!
Percy: Like an old oak table.
Elizabeth: ..."Vanished", Lord Percy, not "Varnished".
Percy: Forgive me, My Lady, but my Uncle Bertram's old oak table completely vanished. 'Twas on the night of the great Stepney fire. And on that same terrible night, his house and all his other things completely vanished too. So did he, in fact. It was a most perplexing mystery.
- Season 16 of The Amazing Race gave us Brent, who made such mistakes as using "anonymous" instead of "unanimous", and "barrier" instead of "bearing".
- Jill (Season 17) not only was a malaproper, but she tended to mispronounce words as well.
- In the Season 20 premiere, the teams are tasked with making empanadas:
Bopper: This is the first time I have ever made a pinata.
Mark: It ain't a pinata, my brotha, it's a empi-za- Well, you call it whatever you want. I don't know neither.
- Mark Wary, a scandal-prone sportsman on the sketch show The Wedge and the spinoff Mark Loves Sharon constantly has to make a public apology for his behaviour, but his malapropisms tend to make things worse. Most common is when he begins each appearance by apologising for an "indecent".
- Bronson from Round the Twist is a kid who often misquotes his elders. On one memorable occasion, he quotes his dad as saying that 'women are intercontinental' instead of 'incomprehensible'.
- Diego, Santi and Fiti in Los Serrano are very fond of using those, several of them becoming catchphrases among the fandom.
- Finn from Glee has this problem - both with using words that don't exist and jumbling whole phrases.
Finn: What's that saying? The show's gotta go all over the place or something.
Rachel: You mean the show must go on.
- Virginia in Raising Hope does this pretty much every episode, and the rest of the family often ends up contributing too.
Virginia: Burt, why are you infusiating yourself in other people's lives?
Virginia: They never found the Limberger baby, you know.
Virginia: Quit your procrasterbating and go talk to him.
Virginia: Raising a baby will dramastically change your life.
- While discussing Jimmy's amnesia:
Virginia: You had ambrosia.
Burt: Anemia.
Virginia: Anemia!
- On Burt's parents visiting:
Burt: Havin' a baby out of wedlock was one of the biggest things they judged me for. I don't want them judging me again for letting you repeat the cycle.
Virginia: It's like a self-refilling prophecy.
Sabrina: So I take it Burt's relationship with his parents is kind of estranged?
Virginia: Oh, no, it's completely strange.
Sabrina: Two malaprops in a row. God, I love this family.
Virginia: Yeah, they are malaprops, but they're also his parents.
- A narrator pulls one of these in a second-rate paleontology documentary . He says dinosaurs had stones in their stomachs for grinding up food called "gastropods." The correct word for these is "gastroliths." "Gastropods" is a fancy word for "snails."
- Inspector Grim from The Thin Blue Line. He once described a suspect as being "as slippery as an owl". He also threatened to lock someone up and "throw away the door."
- On Boy Meets World, Shawn did this sometimes in the earlier seasons.
Shawn: Cory, I'm no rocket Scientologist but... I'm sensing there's something wrong.
Shawn (in a different episode): Without witnesses, it's all just circumcised evidence!
- In a serious example, one of the first indications that Dr. Greene's brain tumor was re-growing on ER was when he started mixing up her pronouns.
- A mangling of the phrase "Long and short of it" was a plot point in one episode of Midsomer Murders.
- Gloria (due sometimes to her accent) and, less frequently, Haley on Modern Family.
- Squiggy on Laverne & Shirley is the KING of this trope, averaging one or two per episode. Some classics include "with God as my waitress," "radioactive pay," and "The Idiot and the Oddity."
- On NYPD Blue, Det. Andy Sipowicz made reference to problems with his "prostrate." John Irvin tried, as gently as he could, to teach Andy that the word was "prostate," but it never quite took.
- In Degrassi the character Spinner did this a lot in the earlier seasons, such as calling Ms. Kwan the pain of his existence rather than the bane, and saying the peace club meeting was boring people into submersion rather than submission.
- Officer Crabtree from 'Allo 'Allo! had this as his standard shtick, as a British undercover agent with a terrible French accent, which was then filtered through the Translation Convention.
Officer Crabtree: Good moaning.
- In Frasier, Niles and Daphne are being hounded by the press and the police in connection with Maris' arrest for murder. Frasier offers to make a statement to the press on their behalf, saying that the two of them will soon be exonerated. However, what he ends up saying is that they will soon be executed.
- In the Teen Wolf episode "Abomination", Scott and Allison both confuse the word "bestiary", which means an ancient book about supernatural creatures, with the word "bestiality", which means something else.
- In The Good Guys, Det. Dan Stark is one. In the pilot, he keeps calling a humidifier a "Humidifinder".
- In the Community episode "Pillows and Blankets", Troy thinks an ultimatum is called an "all tomato".
Troy: It's not a request. I'm giving you an all tomato, meaning that you give me the whole tomato, or else.
- Troy in general has this going for him (confusing "scapegoat" with "escape goat", etc)
- Britta is also prone to this, saying "rowboat cop" instead of RoboCop, "edible complex" instead of "Oedipal complex", etc. It even becomes a plot point in an episode where she says she is going to have a "Sophie B. Hawkins" dance (instead of "Sadie Hawkins") and she spends the rest of the episode doubling down on her mistake because she's tired of Jeff making fun of her.
- The premise of the CBS game show Whew! was for the contestants to correct malapropisms, which in the show's vernacular were "bloopers".
- Murdoch Mysteries: Constable Crabtree mispronounces something or messes up a quote from time to time, especially in the early seasons. Detective Murdoch sometimes corrects him, but once George Crabtree dismisses him and says that they will have agree to disagree as to what the correct expression is, Murdoch stops doing it. The best instance was probably when George repeated after Murdoch that haemo-goblin is the substance causing a chemical reaction.
- Darrell Sheets of Storage Wars is one of these.
Darrell: Brandon and I are kapoop!
[Beat] Darrell: Kapoot!
- Starsky in Starsky & Hutch does this occasionally, for example, referring to a rock as "ignatius" (he meant "igneous") and pronouncing "hippopotamus" as "hoppopitimus." Hutch usually makes fun of him for it.
- A Bit of Fry and Laurie uses this to make fun of Americans in a trial scene, in which both the judge and the prosecuting attorney use phrases like "grievous internal bruisality" and "case dismissulated."
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has the title character, who was trapped underground at the age of 14 and still has an 8th-grade education 15 years later. She's prone to saying things like, "Urethra!"
- Taxi - when Latka goes through a personality change from his regular sweet-natured self to a callous suave cad, Tony calls it a case of "Doctor Jekyll and Mister Heckle".
- Dad's Army: Jones generally does this several times an episode.
- A Different World. Whitley frequently mispronounced the name of Dwayne's girlfriend—"Kino-sabe", "Kikulu", etc. Given how ridiculously simple the girl's name was—Kinu—she was almost certainly deliberately doing it to irritate her. (the backstory on this being that Whitley wanted Dwayne for herself and resented Kinu's presence)
- Cold Case: In one episode, a politician the team is trying to interview is attempting to apologize to a Hispanic organization for having to cut a meeting short. However, instead of the correct phrase "lo siento mucho" (I'm very sorry), he says it as "me siento mucho". As Valens explains to Rush, "He just told them he sits down a lot."
- Cougar Town: Jules often does this with words and phrases she thinks should have different meanings, and then Ellie "approves" the change, much to Grayson's chagrin.
- An episode of The IT Crowd has Jen and Roy each giving the other a hard time over one. First Jen mistakes "putting women on a pedestal" as "putting women on a pedal stool". Later Roy mistakes "Damp Squib" to be "Damp Squid", justifying it by saying that since squids are already damp that's why it makes sense.
- The lead character on According to Jim is sometimes prone to this.
Jim: [About his daughter's bad behaviour] I'm gonna go nip it in the butt!
Dana: It's bud. It's a gardening reference.
- Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island. A Running Gag is her tendency to mix up her expressions, like "The way to a man's stomach is through the kitchen" or "Birds of a feather gather no moss".
- Kaamelott:
- Perceval and Karadoc's dialogues are hilarious when they try to use big words.
Karadoc: [to Arthur, through the door of his bedroom] We are wily-nilly used by you to achieve on an end!
Arthur: What???
Karadoc: We are willy-nilly used by you to achieve on an end!
[beat]
Arthur: [opening the door, thoughtful] You are unwillingly used by me to achieve my ends?
Karadoc: Oh yeah, that's better...
Perceval: The turn of phrase is more gradual...
Arthur: ... Clearer?
Perceval: Clearer, yeah.
Arthur: [half-proud, half-amused] Did you notice that I understand you better and better?
Perceval: Yes, that's what I was just thinking about right now.
Karadoc: Quicker and quicker, at least.
Perceval: It's more spindly!
Arthur: ... More fluent?
Perceval: Right.
- The Burgundian king has no idea of what he's saying, including such gems as "the flower in the bouquet withers... and is never reborn!", "I appreciate fruits in syrup", "Not change plate for the cheese!" and "strong in apples". He also starts sniggering at "biography".
- A Running Gag on Legends of Tomorrow is Mick's inability to come up with the right big word at first (ie. "mechanism", which Sara then connects to "anachronism").
- The Wire sometimes does this, due to the fact that neither cops nor robbers tend to be very bookish people.
- Some detectives laugh about a report in which one of them wrote that that perpetrator was "lying prostate" on the floor (instead of "prostrate").
- When the hoppers are told that the secret Neutral Zone is "like Amsterdam" for its lack of drug restrictions, they don't understand the reference and call it "Hamsterdam," which sticks.
- Come Back Mrs. Noah wouldn't be a David Croft sitcom without a character who confuses similar-sounding long words. In the first episode, Mrs. Noah, not realising the station really is about to launch by mistake, thanks the crew for "stimulating" an emergency for her benefit.
- In the Broad City episode "Hurricane Wanda," Abbi tries to tell her crush Jeremy that a shelf fell and tells him that a felf shell instead.
- On Me-TV's Toon In With Me, during a week long celebration of Bugs Bunny's birthday, Toony the Cartoon Loving Tuna tells of comedy being the universal language.
Toony: It's a language of which I am flatulent.
Bill the Cartoon Curator: You mean "fluent," don't you?
(Toony breaks wind in his fish tank)
Toony: No, I know what I mean!
- A Halloween-themed episode had Bill and Toony on their way down to Svengoolie's Halloween party when the elevator stops and they're locked in. Bill says he's confident they'll get out because he's an "optometrist."
Toony: Uh, Bill...that's "optimist."
- Clarence gives us this line in Episode 4 referring to a clutch of chickens.
Clarence: They're condemned, ain't they, to a life of complete celebration.
Travers: Celibacy.
Clarence: Yes exactly. That and all that, yeah.
- In one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a suspect claims to have a "lullaby" for the crime of the week. Stabler tells him that the word is "alibi" before heading out to investigate his "lullaby".
- On Roseanne, the reverend who marries Scott and Leon is constantly getting words wrong. He invites the guests to join him in the celebration of holy alimony, to take each other as awfully rabid husbands, etc.
- Young Sheldon: In "A Rival Prodigy and Sir Isaac Neutron", Missy's casette recording of a song off the radio is marred because "you can hear Sheldon in the background saying stuff about Sir Isaac Neutron." Missy clearly meant Isaac Newton, but Sheldon probably also mentioned neutrons, making Missy's malapropism understandable.
- Mindhunter subject William Pierce Jr. suffers from Delusions Of Elegance, while also suffering from a brain injury he can't pronounce "but I can spell it"
Holden: You have a very impressive... vocabulary. And I don't always understand your, uh, colloqualisms.
Pierce: Yeah... I got all the good words.
- In Cobra Kai, Johnny has trouble with modern terms, as part of his Disco Dan characterization. For example, he doesn't quite get the concept of Twitter hashtags:
IT'S ON: LAWRENCE-LARUSSO REMATCH! hashbrown dead meat
- The gnomes from The Gnomes of Dulwich call human beings "human beans".
