Malapropism is a historical phenomenon, a linguistic by-product of the new exchange in words. Wilson observed it as well, relating the following anecdote: [A poor man] standyng in muche nede of money, and desirous to have some helpe at a jentlemanns hand, made his complaint in this wise. I praie you sir be so good unto me, as forbeare this halfe yeres rent.
For so helpe me God and halidome, we are so taken on with contrary Bishoppes, with revives, and with Southsides to the kyng, that al our money is cleane gone. These words he spake for contribucion, relief, and subsidie. And thus we see that poore simple men are muche troubled, and talke oftentymes, thei know not what, for lacke of wit and want of Latin and Frenche, whereof many of our straunge woordes full often are derived (Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, pp. 330-1).
In Wilson’s account, the poor mans “want” is not only economic but linguistic; his malapropisms both announce and confirm his impoverishment. Malapropism is, in sociological terms, the “Cockney” of early modern writing. But the chief difference between malapropism and Cockney (for example) is that Cockney, at least in modern literary usage, is a “real” dialect imitated by writers; malapropism, whether a “real” phenomenon or not, consists of forms invented by authors ascribing a low social or educational status to certain characters.
Ben Jonson notes that it had become fashionable among playwrights to create such characters: The Stage-Keeper, in Bartholomew Fair (1631), observes the stock figure of the “watch” (e.g. the Watch in Much Ado About Nothing) who “ha stoln in upon ‘hem, and taken ’hem away, with mistaking words, as the fashion is, in the Stage-practice.”
In the early modern period, there is nothing random about these “mistaking words.” Malapropism is a dialect that is produced by writers in a literary “fashion” of the period. Like Hal and his production of Francis’s “singular” language, Renaissance authors, in effect, create social dialects to articulate the lines of social class. And like Francis’s language, malapropisms do not represent an autonomous language, but are entirely dependent—formally and socially—on the educated dialect of neologism; they are “debasements” that serve to enhance the value of acquiring new and unusual words. (Stephen Greenblatt, 1988)
Shakespeare’s plays exhibit foolery of two kinds, the dry and the sly. This has often been noted, and the change from Bottom and Dogberry to Touchstone and Feste and the Fool in Lear has been credited to the replacement of Will Kempe in Shakespeare’s company by Robert Armin. There is no reason to quarrel with this speculation, so long as we are aware that both styles of fooling appear in Shakespeare’s plays of every date, and would almost necessarily appear there even if Armin and Kempe had never lived, for the reason that they represent the two bases of all humor, the intentional and unintentional.
Dogberry’s humor, in Much Ado, obviously unintentional, is dry. It arises from an engagement to present self and present purposes so single-minded as to inhibit freedom of intellectual and emotional maneuver, and its badge in Shakespearean comedy is normally malapropism. This need not be of the glaring type illustrated in Bottoms’s “There we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.96), or Dogberry’s “If I were as tedious as a king, I could find in my heart to bestow it all of your worship” (Much Ado, 3.5.19).
Juliet’s Nurse manifests malapropism of a subtler kind when, in her effort to reproduce the indignation of a great lady at sexual insult, she drops into the treacherous idiom of: “And thou must stand by too, and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure!” (2.4.146). Much of the humor of Mistress Quickly in I Henry IV comes from ringing the changes on this style of malapropism, as she walks repeatedly into semantic traps: “Thou or any man knows where to have me, thou knave, thou!” (3.3.123).
Still more sophisticated is the form malapropism takes in Malvolio, who does not misuse language like Dogberry (though he does use it at least once with unrealized equivocations — Twelfth Night, 2.5.80 — like Quickly and the Nurse), but abuses it by wrenching it, in the letter laid out for him by Maria, to mean what he wants it to mean: “I may command where I adore.” Why, she may command me: I serve her; she is my lady. Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There is no obstruction in this. And the end; what should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me! Softly, M, 0, A, I. . . . This simulation is not as the former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters is in my name. (2.5.126)
The deception to which Malvolio here falls victim, by crushing the simulation a little, is not far different from that which victimizes Macbeth, when he too crushes to his will the riddling speeches of the Witches; or from what King Lear allows to happen when he reads duty in the flattering phrases of his elder daughters, ingratitude in the blunt speaking of Cordelia; or from what takes place in Othello when his whole vocabulary begins to shift and slide under the erosion of Iago’s insinuations. Here again the attributes of comedy and tragedy throw light on one another.
At the opposite pole from Dogberry’s stands Touchstone’s humor, which is intentional and “sly.” It therefore has for its badge the pun, which is a voluntary effect with language, as malapropism is involuntary. Instead of single-mindedness, pun presupposes multiple-mindedness; instead of preoccupation with one’s present self and purposes, an alert glance before and after; and instead of loss of intellectual and emotional maneuverability, a gain, for language creatively used is freedom.
The alazon shows his innate hubris by using words and the concepts they represent without regard for their properties, like a bad artist — “Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he was here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass. Though it is not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow . . . and which is more, a house-holder, and, which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to! and a rich fellow enough, go to! and a fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns and everything handsome about him. Bring him away. O that I had been writ down an ass!” (Much Ado, 4.2.68)
The eiron honors his materials and, circling them with the golden compass of his wit, marks out a world: Therefore, you clown, abandon (which is in the vulgar, leave) the society (which in the boorish is, company) of this female (which in the common is, woman); which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado, or in steel. I will bandy with thee in faction; I will o’er-run thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways. Therefore tremble, and depart. (As You Like It, 5.1.46)
In view of Cleopatra’s “immortal longings” (280), the Clown’s malapropism is a revealing one. The snake’s bite is “immortal: those that do die of it, do seldom or never recover” (246-247). Cleopatra’s feigned death that brings about Antony’s suicide is also subject to comment, as the Clown knows of a “very honest woman” who gave “a very good report” of the snake after her death from its bite, though this woman was “something given to lie” (250-254).
There is also a harking back to Act I, scene v, where Cleopatra longs to be reunited with Antony, and remembers him calling her “my serpent of old Nile” (I.v.25). Like a serpent, she has indeed caused his death, though Antony had much “joy of the worm” (V.ii.259, 278). The Clown also reminds the audience that the snake does only what it has to do according to its nature, but that it cannot be trusted.
This seems to express his attitude to women in general as well. They may be divine creatures, but half of them are marred by the devil. The remarks on women echo back in the play also, to the split between Octavia and Cleopatra. Not everybody in the audience will catch all these allusions, but in a play as well structured as this, with word images emphatically stressed and repetitions so ingeniously made, it should be surprising if some of it would not be at least passively caught and understood, especially if the Clown addresses his speeches partly to the audience.
Though these few lines of the Clown’s are amusing and draw laughter from the audience on more than one occasion, they also serve to place Cleopatra in a more understandable context. The discrepancy between the Queen and the Clown serves the purpose of strengthening and augmenting the audience’s perception of the fundamental humanity of Cleopatra’s character.
Whereas, Derrida’s notion of “différance” implies far more than if it were simply a malapropism. Once “différance” has been marked by the silent and paradoxical intervention of the phoneme a (which in French does not change the pronunciation of “différence”), it sets into play an additional and different meaning with respect to the traditional or conventional one. This transformation of “différence” as a typological category into “différance,” now as both a typological and a temporally marked category, is recognized by its differing from its own previous state and also as deferring any final and future determination of meaning.
Thus the future state is situated with respect to its past (it therefore has, and always reflects, a history of prior signification); this future state is realized linguistically by the intervention of the phonemic sign into the semantic field expressed by the word “différence.” It is hardly accidental that Derrida selected the word “différence” as the term in which he would place a pivotal sign from which we might initiate a reevaluation of the production of language and meaning. Finally, according to structuralist terminology, “difference” is a fundamental principle used to explain the production of meaning, understood as the positing and recognition of differences.
There is another respect in which thought content differs from sentence content this is that the meaning of a sentence depends upon facts about the community of speakers in a way that the content of someone’s thought does not depend upon the community of thinkers. Because the meaning of a sentence is public property, a person can utter a sentence whose meaning he does not grasp and it nevertheless be true that the sentence had its public meaning on his lips–the words do not lose their meaning just because the speaker does not understand them.
But this property of sentence content does not seem to apply, or not to the same degree, to the content of thoughts you cannot think a proposition you do not grasp. But if judging were mentally uttering a sentence with a meaning, then there should be no such restriction on what can be thought: you could succeed in thinking that sesquipedalianism is an affliction of the erudite just by inwardly uttering that sentence, despite the fact that these words mean nothing to you.
So saying something with content can be dependent on being part of a language community in which words have a public meaning, but you cannot expect your thoughts to have content just by internally uttering words you correctly believe to have content but whose content you do not grasp. The existence of malapropism demonstrates this difference vividly: malapropism occurs in speech when a person’s intended meaning does not match the word she chooses to express that meaning; but there can be no such mismatch in thought, since there is nothing with public content to come apart from private meaning.
To make a judgment with a determinate content one needs actually to have the concepts involved in the judgment; but to say something with a definite content this is not necessary. These differences between the two sorts of content do not perhaps decisively refute the inner saying theory, since they could be disputed or held inessential: but they do raise real questions about the theory that need convincing rebuttals if the theory is to deserve credence.
It will help put these objections in a clearer light if we turn to the third sort of objection we mentioned, namely allegations of circularity; for the import of this sort of objection is that the inner saying theory seems able to capture some of the central features of thought only because it is circular that is, it uses the distinctive features of thought to explain themselves, while taking an idle detour through language. The charge of circularity is, in a nutshell, this: language can seem to explain thought only because speech is to be understood as the expression of thought.
Thus suppose you hear the speech of a foreigner whose language you do not understand: you assume that he is giving expression to a thought which gives his words content. Without this assumption, it seems, his utterance would be mere sound, devoid of significance. But now what of the underlying thought itself? If we analyze this as an inner speech act, then it seems that the conjectured internal utterance must in turn express some thought if it is not to be just a collection of unmeaning characters: but of course this launches us on an infinite regress.
The objector is confronting the inner saying theory with a dilemma: either we say that the inner sentence expresses a thought, in which case the theory is circular; or it does not express a thought, in which case it can have no semantic content. The suggestion is that outer speech has meaning by being connected with propositional attitudes, so we cannot hope to explain what it is to have a propositional attitude by claiming that attitudes consist in inner speech.
This objection does not, as stated, deny that when we think we inwardly utter; what it denies is that such inner utterance could explain what it is to think contextual thoughts. And if the inner saying theory can no longer be regarded as explanatory, the motivation lapses for insisting that we recognize the existence of a language of thought.
Though I believe, Malapropism on top of dialect is also frequent: “preposition” (proposition), “conclusion from de brain” (concussion), “epson-minded” (absent-minded). Laughter at distortion of language is a persistent and invidious and basically primitive form of humor, since its suppressed premise is the superiority of the laugher.
In “Derangement”, Davidson is mainly concerned to clarify one point in his program, which is that the strategic adjustments involved need only be temporary and local. That is to say, the convergence of speaker’s and listener’s beliefs as to the truth-conditions of a sentence being used in a linguistic encounter does not — in principle — have to involve any overall convergence between the truth-theories each person brings to the encounter (and may well take away from it unmodified). Davidson calls the latter their “prior” theories; Dummett suggests it would be more helpful to call them “long-range” theories.
The crucial distinction that Davidson wants to draw in “Derangement” is between these “prior” (or “long-term”) assignments of truth-conditions to sentences and the extent to which, purely within the duration of some linguistic encounter, both participants arrive at common assignments for the sentences in use at the time, which Davidson calls the participants’ “passing” theories (and Dummett, perhaps more helpfully, their “short-term” theories). If this is all that needs to be shared, however, then by implication the concept of a language or of knowing a language drops out as superfluous or, rather, as far more rich and complex a notion than is necessary to explain what happens between speaker and listener.
In his essay, Davidson focuses on the seemingly marginal linguistic phenomenon of malapropism precisely because it involves the violation or circumvention of linguistic convention and yet is as open to correct interpretation as those expressions which do follow the rules. Davidson sees in malapropism the prototype of linguistic creativity, and the generalized version of his argument in “Derangement” is that even though no system of linguistic conventions can anticipate such innovation, linguistic innovation nevertheless takes place all the time and presents no obstacle to understanding; thus, interpreters must really proceed on some other basis than that of applying rules or recognizing conventions.
The following extract, along with the one quoted in the preceding paragraph, and reveals the core of Davidson’s arguments without the hyperbole of his conclusion: “there are no rules for arriving at [convergent] passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities. A passing theory really is like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely. There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data in any field for that is what this process involves” (A nice derangement of epitaphs, 446).
Malapropism shows the continual adjustment that is required. Indeed, there is nothing especially permanent about the background theory; it changes all the time. Though, in cases of malapropism, the semantic identity must come from the literal meaning the speaker thinks the expression has. For that is the meaning which is relevant to the description and explanation of the further things the speaker intends to effect with his utterance.
The case we considered is special in that here the speaker is operating with a false belief about the language-enshrined meaning of the expression. But this case -though special points to a more general conclusion: namely, the language-enshrined meaning of an expression becomes the semantic identity of an utterance of the expression only insofar as the speaker intends it and only insofar as the speaker can reasonably expect his interpreters to grasp his intention.
References
- Donald Davidson. A nice derangement of epitaphs. In Ernest LePore, editor, Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.
- Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1988, p. 45.
- Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), ed. Thomas J. Derrick, New York, Garland Publishing, 1982
