Mrs Malaprop Quotes

Mrs. Malaprop. Her name comes from French “Mal à propos,” meaning inappropriate. Her grave fault was the tendency to substitute a similar-sounding word for the word that she intended to use. “Make no delusions to the past,” she said, in The Rivals (1775), and “I have interceded another letter from the fellow.” “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,” she said, and, “If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.

The Easy Aces was billed as “radio’s laugh novelty,” and Jane Ace was Mrs. Malaprop of the air. Jane had a twangy midwestern voice, slightly softer in natural conversation, that reminded a listener of Bernardine Flynn’s Sade Gook (Vic and Sade). She was one of radio’s enduring female screwballs, Gracie Allen and Marie Wilson being the others. Under the guidance of her husband and writer, Goodman Ace, she defined the term “malapropism” to a generation that had never heard of it or its creator. Mrs. Malaprop was a character in an 18th century play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Her sentences were filled with wrong words that vaguely resembled proper speech and had a great comedic effect on audiences of that time. In the early 1930s, the Aces were effectively combining malapropisms with general “dumb blonde” humor.

Isn’t there a black box data reorder in every book?” asked Mrs. Malaprop. “We could analyze the tea lemon tree.” “Usually,” I replied, “but engineering contracts have to be spread around the BookWorld, and the construction of Book Data Recorders was subcontracted to James McGuffin and Co. of the Suspense genre, so they have a tendency to go missing until dramatically being found right at the end of an investigation. It’s undoubtedly suspenseful, but a little useless.