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Malapropism
A malapropism (also called a malaprop, acyrologia, or Dogberryism) is the mistaken use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance. An example is the statement attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra, regarding switchhitters, "He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious." Malapropisms often occur as errors in natural speech and are sometimes the subject of media attention, especially when made by politicians or other prominent individuals. Philosopher Donald Davidson has said that malapropisms show the complex process through which the brain translates thoughts into language. Humorous malapropisms are the type that attract the most attention and commentary, but bland malapropisms are common in speech and writing. Etymology The word "malapropism" (and its earlier form, "malaprop") comes from a character named "Mrs. Malaprop" in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play '' The Rivals''. Mrs. Malap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eggcorn
An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements,, sense 2 creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them, as for example replacing " Alzheimer's disease" with "old-timers' disease", or Shakespeare's "to the manner born" with "to the manor born". Language change Eggcorns arise when people attempt to use analogy and logic to make sense of an expression – often a stock one – that includes a term which is not meaningful to them. For example, the stock expression "in one fell swoop" might be replaced by "in one foul swoop", the archaic adjective "fell" (for "fierce", "cruel", or "terrible") being replaced with the common word "foul" in order to convey the cruel/underhand meaning of the phrase as the speaker unders ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Rivals
''The Rivals'' is a comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in five acts which was first performed at Covent Garden Theatre on 17 January 1775. The story has been updated frequently, including a 1935 musical and a 1958 episode of the TV series '' Maverick'' (see below) starring James Garner and Roger Moore, with attribution. History Production ''The Rivals'' was Sheridan's first play. At the time, he was a young newlywed living in Bath. At Sheridan's insistence, upon marriage his wife Eliza (born Elizabeth Linley) had given up her career as a singer. This was proper for a gentleman's wife, but it was difficult because Eliza would have earned a substantial income as a performer. Instead, the Sheridans lived beyond their means as they entertained the gentry and nobility with Eliza's singing (in private parties) and Richard's wit. Finally, in need of funds, Richard turned to the only craft that could gain him the remuneration he desired in a short time: he began writ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dogberry
Dogberry is a character created by William Shakespeare for his play ''Much Ado About Nothing''. He is described by ''The Nuttall Encyclopædia'' as a "self-satisfied night constable" with an inflated view of his own importance as the leader of a group of comically bumbling police watchmen. Dogberry is notable for his numerous malapropisms, which sometimes are referred to as "dogberryisms" or "dogberrys" after him. The Dogberry character was created for William Kempe, who played comic roles in Shakespeare's theatre company the Lord Chamberlain's Men. In the play In the play, Dogberry is the chief of the citizen-police in Messina. He is first seen instructing his constables on their duties. He tells them that it is perfectly fine to sleep on duty, and that if they see a thief, they should not touch him, to avoid becoming defiled by association with crime. During their watch the constables overhear a conversation between two characters, Boraccio and Conrade, one of whom has bee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yogi Berra
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015) was an American professional baseball catcher who later took on the roles of manager and coach. He played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) (1946–1963, 1965), all but the last for the New York Yankees. He was an 18-time All-Star and won 10 World Series championships as a player—more than any other player in MLB history. Berra had a career batting average of .285, while hitting 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in. He is one of only six players to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award three times. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history"Yogi Berra" . National Baseball Hall of Fame. Retrieved Apr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mistress Quickly
Mistress Nell Quickly is a fictional character who appears in several plays by William Shakespeare. She is an inn-keeper, who runs the Boar's Head Tavern, at which Sir John Falstaff and his disreputable cronies congregate. The character appears in four plays: ''Henry IV, Part 1'', '' Henry IV, Part 2'', ''Henry V'' and ''The Merry Wives of Windsor''. Character and role In all the plays Quickly is characterised as a woman with strong links to the criminal underworld, but who is nevertheless preoccupied with her own respectable reputation. Her speech is filled with malapropisms, double entendres and "bawdy innuendo". Her name may be a pun on "quick lay", though "quick" also had the meaning of "alive", so it may imply "lively", which also commonly had a sexual connotation.J. Madison Davis, ''The Shakespeare Name and Place Dictionary'', Routledge, 2012, p.406. Quickly's character is most fully developed in ''Henry IV, Part 2'' in which her contradictory aspirations to gentility ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vernacular
A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, normally spoken informally rather than written, and seen as of lower status than more codified forms. It may vary from more prestigious speech varieties in different ways, in that the vernacular can be a distinct stylistic register, a regional dialect, a sociolect, or an independent language. Vernacular is a term for a type of speech variety, generally used to refer to a local language or dialect, as distinct from what is seen as a standard language. The vernacular is contrasted with higher-prestige forms of language, such as national, literary, liturgical or scientific idiom, or a '' lingua franca'', used to facilitate communication across a large area. According to another definition, a vernacular is a language that has not deve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms ''stress'' and ''accent'' are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called '' pitch accent'', and when produced through length alone, it is called ''quantitative accent''. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called ''stress accent'' or ''dynamic accent''; English uses what is called ''variable stress accent''. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define str ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oracular
An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ''oracle'' comes from the Latin verb ''ōrāre'', "to speak" and properly refers to the priest or priestess uttering the prediction. In extended use, ''oracle'' may also refer to the ''site of the oracle'', and to the oracular utterances themselves, called ''khrēsmē'' 'tresme' (χρησμοί) in Greek. Oracles were thought to be portals through which the gods spoke directly to people. In this sense, they were different from seers (''manteis'', μάντεις) who interpreted signs sent by the gods through bird signs, animal entrails, and other various methods.Flower, Michael Attyah. ''The Seer in Ancient Greece.'' Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. The most important oracles of Greek antiquity were Pythia (priestess to Apollo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epitaph
An epitaph (; ) is a short text honoring a deceased person. Strictly speaking, it refers to text that is inscribed on a tombstone or plaque, but it may also be used in a figurative sense. Some epitaphs are specified by the person themselves before their death, while others are chosen by those responsible for the burial. An epitaph may be written in prose or in poem verse. Most epitaphs are brief records of the family, and perhaps the career, of the deceased, often with a common expression of love or respect—for example, "beloved father of ..."—but others are more ambitious. From the Renaissance to the 19th century in Western culture, epitaphs for notable people became increasingly lengthy and pompous descriptions of their family origins, career, virtues and immediate family, often in Latin. Notably, the Laudatio Turiae, the longest known Ancient Roman epitaph, exceeds almost all of these at 180 lines; it celebrates the virtues of an honored wife, probably of a consul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utterance
In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, often beginning and ending with a clear pause. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language; only their representations do. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. In oral/spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Prosodic features include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. Moreover, other aspects of utterances found in spoken languages are non-fluency features including: voiced/un-voiced pauses (i.e. "umm"), tag questions, and false starts, or when someone begins uttering again to correct themselves. Other features include fillers (i.e. "and stuff"), accent/dialect, d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epithet
An epithet (, ), also byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) known for accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It can also be a descriptive title: for example, Pallas Athena, Phoebus Apollo, Alfred the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Władysław I the Elbow-high. Many English monarchs have traditional epithets: some of the best known are Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lionheart, Æthelred the Unready, John Lackland and Bloody Mary. The word ''epithet'' can also refer to an abusive, defamatory, or derogatory phrase. This use as a euphemism is criticized by Martin Manser and other proponents of linguistic prescription. H. W. Fowler complained that "epithet is suffering a vulgarization that is giving it an abusive imputation." Linguistics Epithets are sometimes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metrical Phonology
Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin" (if said out-of-the-blue), the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables. This feature could take on multiple values to indicate various levels of stress. Stress was assigned using the cyclic reapplication of rules to words and phrases. Metrical phonology holds that stress is separate from pitch accent and has phonetic effects on the realization of syllables beyond their intonation, including effects on their duration and amplitude. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
