Malaproper / Real Life

• The second type of this (substitution of similar sounding words) can occur with a condition called paraphasia.
• Comedian Norm Crosby has made a career (or, more recently, an annual Jerry Lewis Telethon appearance) of the art of the carefully mis-chosen word.
• The Grand Master Malaproper of all time is baseball legend Yogi Berra:
  • "It ain't the heat; it's the humility."
  • On the occasion of "Yogi Berra Day" at Sportsman's Park in his native St. Louis: "I'd like to thank all those who made this day necessary."
  • Much of what has been attributed to him is probably apocryphal. In his own words: "I really didn't say everything I said."
• Another baseball legend given to this was Casey Stengel, hence the term "Stengelese":
  • "He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious."
  • "All right, everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height."
  • "There comes a time in every man's life, and I've had plenty of them."
• Yet another baseball figure prone to these was '70s Philadelphia Phillies manager Danny Ozark:
  • "Half this game is 90% mental."
  • "Even Napoleon had his Watergate."
• Then there's Jerry Coleman, who became well known for his "Colemanisms" during his long career as an announcer for the San Diego Padres.
  • "He's throwing up in the bullpen."
  • "He slides into second with a stand-up double."
  • "He swings and misses, and it's fouled back into the stands."
  • "Winfield goes back to the wall, he hits his head on the wall, and it rolls off! It's rolling all the way back to second base. This is a terrible thing for the Padres."
• Whatever you might think of the man himself, there's no denying that former President George W. Bush was somewhat prone to this, to the point where it was given its own term: Bushisms. Some of these include:
  • "People that had been trained in some instances to disassemble. That means not tell the truth."
  • "I know how hard it is to put food on your family."
  • "I want to make the pie higher."
  • "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."
  • "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"
  • One of Bush's most famous was "There's an old saying in Tennessee – I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."
  • "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
  • "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
• Gerald Ford was another President who was occasionally subject to this.
  • "Things are more like today than they have ever been before."
  • "If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be turning over in his grave."
  • "I watch a lot of baseball on the radio."
• British sports commentator David Coleman was very prone to malapropisms, to the point where Private Eye named a regular column of gaffes "Colemanballs". Coleman has since retired; as long as public figures put their feet in their mouths, or sport commentating exists, "Colemanballs" will live on. Two of his most famous slip-ups were "Harry Commentator is your carpenter" and "I'm glad to say that this is the first Saturday in four weeks that sport will be weather-free."
• Montreal Canadiens coach and later sports commentator Jean Perron was so notorious for this that malapropisms and mixed metaphors are called "perronismes" in Quebec French.
• Ringo Starr often made malapropisms, to the point where, when they needed a title for their first film, The Beatles just used something Ringo had said a few evenings prior.
  • "Tomorrow Never Knows" (only the title)
  • Possibly "Eight Days a Week", although Paul variously attributed the title to Ringo and to a chauffeur. Either way, it's an example of this trope. Sirius XM radio's Beatles Channel even uses "24/8" as a display on subscribers' radios.
  • Definitely came up with the title for "A Hard Days Night", when upon leaving Abbey Road, Ringo found, much to his surprise that evening had fallen whilst The Beatles were recording. ^note  And guess which of The Beatles collects watches....
  • Legend has it that he did this so often that, when he was a kid at school, his fellow students would approach him and start conversations with him just to hear him talk.
• Unfortunately common all over the world. Scott Adams publishes "Dogbert's New Ruling Class Newsletter" when he feels like it, and a regular feature is a section citing malapropisms and garbled adages which readers heard, mostly from their Pointy-Haired Boss and cow-orkers.
• Karl Pilkington, a fellow presenter on "The Ricky Gervais Show" often confused expressions and pronunciations, usually by embellishing details and not following the original news sources correctly
• Finnish ski jumper Matti Nykänen is known for many things, among them malapropisms and other rather interesting quotes. For instance, he has spoken of a "bon voyage-feeling — a feeling of having experienced something before", and estimated his chances as being "fifty-sixty".
• My Immortal. Listed under Real Life rather than Fan Fic because it's not the characters who keep screwing up long words (well, they do too, by extension), it's the author. Often results in a dirty word being inadvertently turned into something clean... or vice versa.
• During moral panics about pedophilia, offices of children's doctors (pediatricians) have been vandalized, and literature connected with teaching (pedagogy) has been attacked. As if criminal pedophiles would announce themselves like that.
• An Urban Legend rather than an actual occurrence, but George Smathers was reported as having slammed Claude Pepper during one race: supposedly he said: "Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy." This isn't a malapropism, though; the person who wrote the supposed speech was using exactly the correct words.
• Thomas "Mumbles" Menino, the former Mayor of Boston, is infamous for this sort of thing (along with the fact that you can barely tell what he's saying in the first place). The more famous ones are him calling Boston's parking shortage "An Alcatraz around my neck" and referring to a former mayor as "A man of great statue." Then there was the time he referred to Patriots player Rob Gronkowski, popularly known as Gronk, as Gonk.
• Ursula Pendragon-White, who appeared at least twice in the memoirs of Gerald Durrell. Perhaps the mildest screwups mentioned were talking about a woman who wanted an ablution to avoid having an illiterate baby (which sounds like Unfortunate Implications until you consider that "illiterate" is being used instead of "illegitimate") and ordering a "graffiti with ice".
• When prince Willem-Alexander of Orange was in Mexico during an official tour in early November 2009, he managed to mangle the Mexican proverb "Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente" (Translated literally as "The prawn who sleeps gets dragged away by the current", in context it would be something like "You snooze, you lose") as "Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la chingada" (Replace "dragged away by the current" with "ends all fucked up"). And while both phrases are often interchangeable, the latter is actually something you wouldn't use in these kinds of situations due to "Chingada" being a truly offensive word in Mexican Spanish. But that didn't stop the crowd from taking it as a joke.
• Milous Jakes, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was target of jokes due to this. From The Other Wiki:
  He gained unwanted fame through his famous speech addressed to local party workers in Červený Hrádek close to Plzeň. When speaking about the necessity of Gorbachev-inspired "perestroika", he presented himself and the party as a lonely fence-post being allegedly left alone to overcome the hardships. On the same occasion he mistook the word broiler (type of chicken) for boiler and spoke in an embarrassingly familiar way about some official Czech pop music singers when pointing to their allegedly super-high incomes ("Nobody of us earns so much!").
• In a video that went severe Memetic Mutation in Brazil involving a cancelled autograph session by Restart, an angry girl calls the thing a "puta falta de sacanagem". In English, it would be like: "great fuck-up" + "lack of respect" = "great lack of fuck-up".
• Also from Brazil, Vicente Matheus, who managed local team Corinthians, was prone to gems such as "Who's in the rain is to get burned!", "It was a result that both Greeks and Napolitans (Trojans) liked" and "A player needs to be like a duck, who is an animal both aquatic and grasstic."
• These can also be induced by computers. For examples, see Scunthorpe Problem.
• The liner notes to an unauthorized Beatles cash-in album contained the sentence "It is with great pride that this copulation is presented".
• Chilean ex-President Sebastián Piñera can be described as George W. Bush meets Mitt Romney: "mártis" (instead of mártires, martyrs), "tusunami" (tsunami), "galáctea/galáctia" (galaxia, galaxy), "cubrido" (cubierto, covered), etc. He is also a big Know-Nothing Know-It-All and, unsurprisingly, a huge Fountain of Memes.
• The example of this trope everyone thinks of in the UK is Murray Walker who commentated on Formula One and other motorsports between 1950 and 2001. He became very beloved and popular not only for how enthusiastic he sounds but also for the amount of gaffes and mistakes he made in the heat of the moment, referred to as Murrayisms. Here's some of the most well known examples:
  "Here in Malaysia, it doesn't rain here by the bucketful, it rains by the ocean."
  "Albereto is coming into the pits and I'm going to stop the startwatch!"
  "I can't imagine what kind of problem Senna has. I imagine it must be some sort of grip problem."
  "One light, two lights, three lights, four laps, five lights, go, go, go!"
  "That's history. I say history because it happened in the past."
  "Anything happens in Grand Prix racing, and it usually does."
  "And you can see the by the body language of the Benetton mechanics, that they are AB. SO. LUTE. LY... FURIOUS!"
• Jean Chrétien, former Prime Minister of Canada, is well known for regular malapropisms in both English and French whenever he wasn't reading from a prepared speech, though this also added to his real-life Narm Charm. A common joke at the time was that he was the first Prime Minister in Canadian history who couldn't speak either official languages. ^note  to Chrétien's credit, he found this Actually Pretty Funny and would repeat it against himself!
• German comedian Otto Waalkes once did a sketch that contains of a speech that is almost nothing but malaprops. And that speech was about - proper use of language.
• The late Victor Chernomyrdin, Russian ex-PM. Didn't overtly mangle words, but often failed in combining them into meaningful sentences. Or got completely unexpected effect.
  • "You have to be born in charisma!"
  • "There's no better worse than vodka."
  • "My life passed in an atmosphere of gas and oil."
  • "We've never seen such things, and here they go again."
  • "Teachers and doctors need to eat, too. Almost every day."
  • "Principles that were important, were unimportant."
  • "Wanted to do better, but did as always."
  • Lebed^note general, opposition politician, name translates as "swan" and Grachev^note defense minister, name derived from "rook" are like two birds who can't get along in the same bear-hole.
• Mike Tyson has had many hilarious malapropisms:
  • "Hannibal, he rode elephants into Cartilage."
  • "I guess I'll fade into Bolivian."
• Football player Franck Ribéry is this in France. His grammatically dubious, stereotypically low-brow statements have come to be known as "ribérysmes", achieving Memetic Mutation.
  • During the 2006 World Cup in Germany, he once referred to the Togolese team as "Tongolese".
  • "The Stade Vélodrome ^note the home stadium of the Olympique de Marseille, like, say, Old Trafford is for Manchester United is a stadium that's always full, whether at home or away!"
  • "Imma fuck your mom, cousin!" ("J'te nique ta mère direct, cousin!")^note "cousin" being used in French slang in a similar way as the N-word can be in its other usage
  • "Finland is always a place I like to come." ("La Finlande, c'est toujours un endroit que j'aime bien venir.")
  • "It's a game played in two games."
  • "Unconsciously, you can't fall asleep."
  • "I think we hope we're going to win."
• Presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has become infamous for this. On a pre-campaign trip to China, while visiting the Great Wall, she remarked upon the "bravitude" of the Chinese people. It doesn't make any more sense in French than it does in English.
• German TV and radio host Jürgen Domian sometimes gets called Dominan by his callers.
• This language blogger was (allegedly) fired for a blog post about homophones. Their reasoning was that the publication doesn't want to be associated with homosexuality (!). The report prompted this tongue-in-cheek reply.
• Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has some infamous malapropisms. Most infamously, when criticising a political rival, he noted, "No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom."
• In December 2014, at a Hanukkah ceremony, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker got in trouble for mangling the Hebrew expression "Mazel Tov" ^*"congratulations" as "Molotov", as in "Molotov Cocktail". Things got worse was it was revealed it was written that way in his script for the event.
• Political commentator and Donald Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes made a reference to "mazel tov cocktails" on a CNN appearance toward the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.
• John Travolta's infamous "Adele Dazim" when introducing Idina Menzel at the Academy Awards. She retaliated by introducing him the following year as "Glom Gazingo" - just after host Neil Patrick Harris said "Benedict Cumberbatch, great actor and how John Travolta calls Ben Affleck".
• Spain's known politician and reelected president Mariano Rajoy (2011-2018) has become rather infamous for falling to this on several occasions:
  • "It's very difficult todo esto" (Untranslated quote) ("All of this it´s very difficult")
  • "Todo lo que se ha publicado en los medios no es cierto, salvo alguna cosa" ("Everything that has been published in the media is not true, save for some things")
  • "A veces la mejor decisión es no tomar ninguna decisión, y eso también es una decisión." ("Sometimes the best choice is not making a choice, and that is also a choice")
  • "Las decisiones se toman en el momento de tomarlas." ("Choices are made at the moment of making them.")
  • "Al final, los seres humanos somos sobre todo personas con alma y sentimientos y esto es muy bonito" ("In the end, we human beings are above all people with souls and feelings, and this is very beautiful.")
• Vitaliy Klichko, a former boxer, was discovered to be one after becoming the mayor of Kyiv. His quotes make great memes.
  • "Today, not everyone can look into tomorrow. To be more precise, not only everyone can look into there, few people can do this..."
  • "I, for one, can't see any smells."
  • "I want to draw everyone's attention [to the fact that] I talked to many militiamen who died, with people, protestants who died and they all ask the same question..."
  • "I have two deputies, four of whom..."
• It's common to hear stories of signs or otherwise reading "We apologise for any incontinence caused" instead of "inconvenience".
• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in his attempts to emulate his predecessor Hugo Chávez, frequently slips into this during his speeches. Notable examples include his infamous "Cristo multiplicó los penes" (he combined "peces" (fish) with "panes" (loaves), but ended up changing "Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves" to "Christ multiplied the penises"), and saying things like "millones y millonas", "estudiantes y estudiantas", as if trying to be inclusive with both the male and female genders (the equivalent of saying "she-millions" and "she-students"), when only the first words are correct in Spanish.
• Mexico's one-time president Enrique Peña Nieto was guilty of turning a Mexican place into a Japanese one ("Okinawa" instead of "Ojinaga"), calling several cities as states(Tijuana and Monterrey), and generally just botching his talk.
• The Reddit sub r/BoneAppleTea is dedicated to collecting examples of this trope.
  • That's cool, but I can't mustard up the energy to get all bent out of shape over it"
  • "The doctor has advised me to not eat any type of crushed Asians - like crabs and stuff"
  • "I am not an English major either, but I thing "right" and "correct" are cinnamons"
  • "My mom is my angle..."
  Commenter: And my Dad is my protractor...
• This trope can cause commonly-used idioms to morph over time; after enough mishearings, the misheard version becomes the new standard. One of the more infamous cases is "couldn't care less" becoming "could care less" (which, taken literally, should mean the exact opposite).

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