Word: malaprop
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fact that "some of our actors were delayed by a faithless hackman." Generation after generation, family actors staged everything from Henry IV and She Stoops to Conquer to melodramas such as The Brigands of Lodi and The Dead Shot. Famed Actress Fanny Kemble appeared at the Varieties as Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals, but was so disturbed by the closeness of the audience that she never returned. Rarely used in recent years, the little theater, with its gilt chairs, roll-down curtain (a Nile landscape) and flaming torches, seemed an ideal setting for Rameau's wispily amusing farce about...
...world," says British-born Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "that American women are the most beautiful-and that they can make themselves even better than they are. The beauty industry is, socially, highly important and desirable. There is certainly a magic transformation performed on women who enter appearing like Mrs. Malaprop and leave as beautifully embellished as Madame Recamier reclining on her chaise longue...
Libby will also bring to the U.S. Congress a flair for unintentional comedy. Dubbed "Mr. Malaprop" by the Chicago press, he refers to voters of Slavic ancestry as "Slavishes," once spoke of late autumn as the time of year when "the moss is on the pumpkin." Last week, asked why he had been keeping comparatively quiet since the primary, Libby replied: "I am trying not to make any honest mistakes...
...breathe a sigh of real comfort' . . . The New Yorker spotted a movie theater sign on which 'adultery' was used to mean 'adulthood.' From an English periodical I learn that some new houses 'affront the opposite side of the street.' If Mrs. Malaprop is going to become the patron saint of English, what is going to prevent 'contention' from meaning the same thing as 'contentment' or the maker of woodcuts from being called a woodcutter...
...Tammany Hall machine, who filled in as the Democrats' mayor of New York (1932-33) when Jimmy Walker quit under pressure; of pneumonia; in Manhattan. The prototype of Novelist Joel Sayre's political satire, Hizzoner the Mayor, O'Brien kept his constituents constantly amused with his malaprop oratory (Sample: "That scientist of scientists, Albert Weinstein"), cooperated with pressagents by accepting such titles as "Ole-Bo-Lon, the Scentless Chrysanthemum" from a Chinese restaurant, habitually referred to New York as "this great metropolis city." So loyal was he to Tammany that when reporters once asked...