by Kevin Burton
If you have ever suffered a slip of the tongue, or a trip and all out tumble, you will appreciate the first of our words today from Merriam-Webster.
Who among us hasn't reached for a word, deployed it with great confidence, only to find it mangled in some way, often to our great embarrassment?
Yesterday we began with their list of words that came from characters from literature. We resume today with a word for an unintended slicing and dicing of the language:
Malapropism: a blundering use of a word that sounds somewhat like the one intended but is ludicrously wrong in the context
"Richard Sheridan, the Irish dramatist, is responsible for the word malapropism, as it is based on the name of a character, Mrs. Malaprop, who appears in his 1775 play, The Rivals."
"Mrs. Malaprop was given to making such statements as "He is the very pine-apple of politeness" (meaning pinnacle) and "promise to forget this fellow - to illiterate him, I say, from your memory" (meaning obliterate). By 1830 the word added the suffix -ism, and had begun to be used to refer to examples of humorously mistaken language, staying with us ever since."
Milquetoast: a timid, meek, or apologetic person
"Comic strips may not seem like the most likely source to have provided English with new words, but they have actually been quite fertile in this regard."
"Milquetoast is one such word: it comes from the name of Caspar Milquetoast, a character invented by cartoonist H. T. Webster in 1924 for his strip Timid Soul (it was based on milk toast, a dish of toast softened in milk). Comic strips have also given us the word dagwood (a comically large sandwich, named after Dagwood Bumstead, from the comic Blondie), and it is likely that goon (a thuggish man) was largely taken from the character Alice the Goon in the comic strip Thimble Theatre in the early 20th century."
Micawber: an improvident person who lives in expectation of an upturn in his fortunes
"Wilkins Micawber was an eternally optimistic and frequently impoverished character from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, published as a serial novel in 1849 and 1850."
"Many other character names from Dickens novels have been turned into words, including Pecksniffian (marked by unctuous hypocrisy, from Martin Chuzzlewit, Pickwickian (marked by simplicity and generosity of character, from Pickwick Papers), and, perhaps best-known of all, scrooge (a miserly person, based on Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol).
Panglossian: marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds
"Master Pangloss, the tutor for the titular character of Voltaire's novel Candide, was prone to making such pronouncements as 'they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.'"
"The novel, a satire on the subject of philosophical optimism, is Voltaire's best-known work. In large part due to this popularity the fictional tutor has seen his name forever associated with unfettered and irrational optimism.
Pollyanna: an irritatingly cheerful person
"Pollyanna bears a certain resemblance to panglossian and Micawber. This shows us that, when it comes to having words to describe the irritatingly optimistic people in our midst, there is no such thing as too many synonyms."
"Pollyanna is taken from name of the heroine of the novel (of the same name) by Eleanor Porter, published in 1913.
Syphilis: a chronic, contagious, usually venereal, and often congenital disease caused by a spirochete
"Very few sexually transmitted diseases are cheery, and syphilis is no exception. However, in the realm of STDs, it is an exception insofar as it takes its name from the character in a work of literature."
"Syphilis was the name of the ostensible first sufferer of the disease, a shepherd and hero (if such a word can be used here) of the 1530 poem written by the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus."
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