Does accidental wit exist?
Well, it’s like throwing a wrench in a china shop. Even if it serves the trick and you hit two birds on the head, why did you have a horse in the game in the first place?
Those twisted idioms are malaphors, a term coined to describe inadvertently pungent blends of malapropism and metaphor. And when it comes to malaphors, the king of the heap is David Hatfield, proprietor of malaphors.com. So I put the question to him: If the surprising creativity in a blend of phrases is unintentional, is it still witty?
“I would say yes,” Hatfield replied. “Think of the creativity of ‘roll up your elbows and get to work,’ or ‘she’s green behind the ears.’ They are indeed witty and very creative, perhaps from the subconscious.”
From there, or from CNN. Hatfield sources many of his specimens from cable news, where talking heads with endless hours of airtime to fill often end up making a melange of clichés. Get your eggs in a row or let the ship go down in flames!
This fits with the Stopped Clock Theory of Wit, unearthed in GWQ No.16 in relation to the strange case of Tallulah Bankhead: Just keep talking and eventually you’ll say something interesting. It helps if you already speak in idioms, and if, as Hatfield recalls of the colleague who launched his malaphoric career, the speaker has “a tendency to have one too many martinis at lunch, which seemed to help the mental hiccups.”
The great scholar Douglas Hofstadter celebrated malaphors as clues to how the brain really worked. When you come up with just the right turn of phrase, he wrote, it’s like magic. When you come up with just the left turn of phrase,
“... you see not only the miraculous appearance of a rabbit, but also perhaps a tip of the rabbit’s ear protruding from underneath the table, a bit of glue, or a hint of a trap door in the tabletop.”
Hatfield’s favourite subspecies of malaphor are wordblends, which I hereby rechristen thwartmanteaux. As Hatfield explains,
“Unlike a portmanteau, they are not combinations of words forming a new word (smoke and fog = smog) but rather two words mashed together to form a malaphor. Many improve on the two words. These include breadearner, slimebag, squirmish, and my favorite — Buckminster Palace.”
The royal family certainly should be put under a geodesic dome, but not on purpose. Malaphors, above all else, must be unintentional. While penicillin and cornflakes were both invented by accident, that doesn’t mean they should be enjoyed together.
Quick quips; lightning
“If you hear someone using sporting metaphors to describe the political scene, you can usually count on being patronized, bored, and misled.”
— Christopher Hitchens
“The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.”
— Paul Valery
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’”
— Isaac Asimov
Get Twit Quick
The quest to find that one perfect tweet continues, and this week our guide is @DrakeGatsby.
Q. What’s the one word that makes any tweet better?
A. A deadpan “ok”
Q. Edit button y/n?
A. Mostly no, I think allowing small edits of a few characters within a ten minute window would be ok to fix things like typos but I dont think allowing people to alter too much of a tweet after the fact is a good idea.
Q. All-time fave book or movie?
A. Favorite movie is No Country For Old Men, favorite book is Meet Me In The Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman.
Q. Joke, epigram, or witticism you live by?
A. You have to either say a smart thing in a dumb way or a dumb thing in a smart way.
Q. Best thing to put on toast?
A. Jalapeño cream cheese!
Thank you for reading GWQ No. 76. Dave Hatfield collects malaphors on his website, and he’s used his elbow juice to compile them into a few books. Douglas Hofstadter says you can’t identify all the factors that create a malaphor “just as it is impossible for anyone to taste a richly spiced soup and to definitively enumerate all its ingredients.” That suggests he was ready for lunch, as am I. Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting was a torrent of verbiage. If your heart’s not in your stomach, tap the ♥️ below.
This was a great article, Mr. Errett. You are the top of the notch! Dave Hatfield, Malaphor King