Malapropisms and Dogberryisms

These are maybe two words you have not heard used in conversation very often.

However, they describe a speech characteristic you have probably heard more than you realise...

You see, they are both terms given for when a person substitutes one word for a similar sounding word when speaking.

My dear hubby does this quite often.  Just yesterday he said 'installation' when he was referring to some 'insulation'.  ...and he definitely didn't want it installed anywhere!

Often someone will say 'there's a term to describe that'.  But so far no-one has known what the term is. So today I did a bit of a 'google' to find out.

So if you do it too, you are probably not getting Dementia, so don't worry too much. It may be just a slip of concentration or a result of tiredness. Hopefully most of the time the error will be harmless and even humorous!

And in case you are wondering where the descriptions 'Malapropisms' and 'Dogberryisms' come from, here is an extract from Wikipedia:

"The word "malapropism" (and its earlier variant, "malaprop") comes from a character named "Mrs. Malaprop" in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals.^[2] Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks (to great comic effect) by using words which don't have the meaning she intends, but which sound similar to words that do. Sheridan presumably chose her name in humorous reference to the word malapropos, an adjective or adverb meaning "inappropriate" or "inappropriately", derived from the French phrase, mal à propos (literally "poorly placed"). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of "malapropos" in English is from 1630,^[3] and the first person known to have used the word "malaprop" in the sense of "a speech error" is Lord Byron in 1814.^[4]
The synonymous term "Dogberryism" comes from the 1598 Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing, in which the character Dogberry utters many malapropisms to humorous effect"