Malapropism

 I was watching Pop Culture Jeopardy with MJ tonight (I know, big Saturday night plans- but we did watch Love Actually together before that, which was great to reminiscence on, and Amazon Prime actually has the cut-out sex scenes with Martin Freeman) and one of the contestants, on a question about a former governor from Minnesota who also appeared in Predator, answered, "Jesse James" instead of the right answer, Jesse Ventura. Even MJ knew enough that Jesse James was the outlaw (she called it "bang-bang person") from the 1800s and wouldn't belong in a pop culture jeopardy category (unless I guess there was a recent movie or documentary about it, definitely possible). But it's just an example of how normal people have malapropisms, the incorrect use of a word in place of a word that sounds familiar. Everyone has these, even the best Jeopardy contestants fumble with them from time to time, and I can now understand why: The sheer amount of information out there in the world, even just the trivia world of having to know certain things, is so vast that names get confused, certain things just sound the same. For example, Margaret Wise Brown is the author of Goodnight Moon, a famous children's book. But Tina Brown is the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Daily Beast, etc. But Helen Gurley Brown was the first editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Confused yet? And just to top it off, there's a Rita Mae Brown who was an LGBT activist and writer for her book "Rubyfruit Jungle." These 3 are all expected trivia material for Jeopardy, so it's totally understandable to get them mixed up. 

Our brains (ok, I'll jsut say my brain) makes so many of these mistakes all of the time, and they would have continued to do so until I fixed them. Often in life we just let small things go because they're not important and not worth fretting about. But sometimes it IS good to nitpick details, especially if those details come up over and over again and you're always getting them wrong. I had to correct myself the other day that it's White MEN Can't Jump the Wesley Snipes movie about basketball and Jeopardy, not just "White Man" (there's only one white man character, Woody Harrelson in the movie, to be fair to my memory)... if I don't fix that there, I continue making that mistake forever. Lesson, I guess, is to learn it right the first time, because it takes longer to unlearn a mistake later. How to unlearn a mistake? I've been trying the "say it five times" of rote memorization, but also just write down my mistakes, as hurtful as it is to my pride, especially long words that I know I will have trouble remembering and probably fumbling one of the later syllables. Okeefenokee (swamp in Georgia), for example, or  Okeechobee (lake in Florida). They're like tongue twisters, these facts. 

Common relative of malapropism? Spoonerisms. Switching consonants of back to back words, for example, like jelly beans to belly jeans. That's funny. Often pretty funny when it's said in conversation, which may be why I hadn't tried to actively fix them before. My dad calls avocado a Colorado. 

I think about common errors I make in foreign languages- Chinese? Sure, plenty of words I get wrong with pronunciation that I have to correct myself, or someone else corrects me, Japanese, yup. Often people just brush past them because the listener knows what the speaker is trying to say, so the conversation just moves on unchecked. And yes, in regular conversation, if someone says "I might fade into Bolivia" instead of "I might fade into oblivion," do I know what they mean? Yes, sure, but I like to be precise, and I guess my inner English teacher might feel like correcting them (I do this to MJ plenty of times with stuff like "ours is good" versus "ours are good." I just wince every time someone gets something slightly wrong on an answer, because I know I'm going to make a similar mistake too. 

By the way, Beast Games by Mr. Beast is just horrifically bad and an obvious money grab ahead of Squid Game 2.......but that didn't stop me from making MJ watch 2 episodes last night. Mr. Beast.... weird dude.