Mrs Malaprop, Dogberry, and the Misuse of Words

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Which word is being described here? Ultimately inspired by a play (a comedy) by a well-known playwright whose surname begins with S, the word was derived from the name of a comic character in that play who often uses the wrong word to describe something, with ludicrous results. This word first turns up in print (according to the OED) in the 1830s, although the play which inspired the word was written some time before that.

The answer? Well, actually, there are two possible answers that fit those clues: ‘Dogberryism’ and ‘Malapropism’.

The word ‘malapropism’ is derived from Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. In Sheridan’s comedy, Mrs Malaprop frequently uses the wrong word for the thing she means, as in the famous line: ‘Sure, if I reprehend [i.e., apprehend] any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular [i.e., vernacular] tongue, and a nice derangement [i.e., arrangement] of epitaphs [i.e., epithets]!’

So, you get the idea. But although Mrs Malaprop inspired the word ‘malapropism’ – which the Oxford English Dictionary traces back to the poet and critic Leigh Hunt in 1830 – the adverb ‘malapropos’ turns up in print a full two centuries earlier, in 1630, meaning ‘in an inopportune, inappropriate, or awkward manner’ (it then became an adjective around the beginning of the following century).

Mrs Malaprop’s name, and the phenomenon to which her name was lent, are an extension of this existing Latin-derived word, which roughly means ‘inappropriate’ or ‘bad purpose’.

And the phenomenon of the malapropism was not Sheridan’s invention. Dogberryisms, after Dogberry, the chief of police in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, are an identical slip of the tongue, such as when Dogberry announces: ‘Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended [i.e., apprehended] two auspicious [i.e., suspicious] persons, and we would have them this morning examined before your worship.’

‘Dogberryism’ appears in print in 1836, just six years after ‘malapropism’ makes its debut, and the two terms are interchangeable. Note that Mrs Malaprop uses (or almost uses) the same distinctive verb as Dogberry: ‘apprehend’. The two characters substitute that for different wrong words, though; nevertheless, the link is suggestive of a direct line of influence from Shakespeare to Sheridan.

It is curious that it was ‘malapropism’ (the initial capital letter demoted – or is it promoted? – to the status of lower-case, suggesting full integration into the language) rather than ‘Dogberryism’ that took hold in the nineteenth century.

Indeed, the latter never lost its initial capital, either because it remained too rare a coinage, or because the ‘mal-’ prefix of the former lent itself readily to a word describing the misuse of something (compare ‘malfeasance’, ‘malpractice’, ‘maladjusted’, and so on). By the 1830s, Shakespeare was well and truly enshrined as the national poet. Yet Sheridan’s word took off while poor old Dogberry remained in the shadows.

I suppose ‘malapropism’ rolls off the tongue more, and although Dogberry appears in the works of the most famous English writer of them all, he isn’t the most famous character in Much Ado about Nothing by a long way. Yet if you say ‘Sheridan’s Rivals’ to someone and ask them to name a character from that play, the commonest answer (if they could name one at all) would be Mrs Malaprop, rather than Lydia Languish, Anthony Absolute, or Lucius O’Trigger.

So, ‘malapropism’ is the word that’s stuck, rather than ‘Dogberryism’ or, indeed, ‘acyrology’ or ‘acyrologia’, which is the general term for the incorrect use of language. Pleasingly, the OED’s first citation for this word is from 1550 from a man named Richard Sherry (rather than Richard Sheridan!).

But even before ‘malapropism’ became the defining term, ‘malaprop’ was in use, from 1814. In March of that year, Lord Byron wrote in his journal: ‘Merivale is luckily a very good-natured fellow, or, God he knows what might have been engendered from such a malaprop.’ This version of ‘malaprop’ was soon superseded by ‘malapropism’, but ‘to malaprop’ became a verb in the mid-twentieth century.

All of this reminds me of my favourite malapropism, which was reported in 2005 in the New Scientist. The malapropism in question might be described as a metamalapropism, because it’s an example of someone using a malapropism in place of the very word ‘malapropism’. A worker described a colleague as ‘a vast suppository of information’ (meaning repository, of course). When his error was pointed out to him, he duly apologised for his ‘Miss-Marple-ism’.

So, although the word ‘malapropism’ is the usual go-to word to describe somebody mixing up one word for another, we shouldn’t forget the similarly literary ‘Dogberryism’. The origin of ‘malapropism’ takes us back to a famous play that was the sensation of its age, but another play – that by Shakespeare – has also given us an alternative term for the phenomenon.

And perhaps we should take up the well-meaning ‘Miss-Marple-ism’ as the word to denote somebody’s malapropistic attempt to correct a previous malapropism by uttering … another malapropism? Call it a form of Muphry’s Law, if you will.