‘They’ve got a lovely new vulva next door’: malapropisms for the ages

Readers of this column are among the wittiest, most erudite and engaging of all. It helps that it appears, in the print edition, next to the crosswords, proving that it’s all about those three essentials: location, location, location.

Last December I wrote about malapropisms, whereby some people mistakenly use a word that sounds like the correct one but isn’t. It prompted hilarious responses.

A Co Galway reader recalled a local woman, when asked how her mother was after the unfortunate death of a son, replied: “She is bolivious [oblivious] to it all.” On a sweltering summer’s day, the same woman complained that “the humility [humidity] is killing me”. Then, maybe she’s from Cork.

Commenting on her less-than-angelic younger brother, she said he was back home again “creating haddock [havoc] ... ”.

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Another correspondent recalled how their father-in-law “stunned us all one evening by announcing: ‘They’ve got a lovely new vulva next door.’ It was a Volvo but nobody had the heart to correct him.”

[ Have you been to Queen Maeve's Vulva? Ireland's oddest placenames ]

Yet another reader overheard a woman in a Dublin cafe say: “I absolutely love Black Boris gateaux.” She meant Black Forest gateaux. The conversation continued: “The poor girl had her baby last week – she had to have a Cistercian.” She meant a Caesarean section. Cistercians take a little longer.

Readers chided me too, correctly, on missing out on one of Fianna Fáil’s newest member’s better-known malapropisms. They referred to Bertie Ahern’s “smoke and daggers” comment in 2007, when he may have meant snakes and ladders, smoke and mirrors or cloak and dagger.

Finally, a word to those lovely Leitrim readers who rushed to correct me when I said their beloved Drumshanbo, from the Irish, meant “ridge of the old cow”.

In a voice that “like thunder spake”, they disagreed. Drumshanbo meant “the ridge of the old huts”, they insisted. Who am I to disagree?

I began to feel like one of those ordnance survey characters in Brian Friel’s play Translations, making up poor English versions for Irish placenames.

Timidly (you don’t mess with people who make Gunpowder Gin) I explained that the “old cow” explanation came from the Placenames Database of Ireland.

But what do they know?

Drumshanbo from Droim Sean Both, for “ridge of the old huts”.

inaword@irishtimes.com