What funny linguistic misstep have you witnessed recently?

Just give me a little bit, my husband will do something I can write here. He does these things all the time. He has some ongoing; like saying dumbwit instead of dimwit. I can see why that makes sense to him. I’ve told him it should be dimwith, but fir some reason it doesn’t stick with him, or he sticks to dumbwit on purpose.

Not lately, but years ago I worked for a creative director whom we dubbed “The Malaprop King.” He was a highly volatile character, and once, when ranting about a secretary he didn’t like, he said to us… “She’s nothing but a barbecue doll!!!” (of course meaning “Barbie doll”). Another time he got mad at somebody at someone who was making an excuse for something that had gone wrong and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Stop pulling the wool over my ears!”

Pachy, I bet he’d “cut off his nose in spite of his face.” ;-)

JLeslie, I have a dear friend who matches the description of your husband. “You get first dabs.” “It’s coming to attrition.” “Give me a minute to decompose.”

Love ‘em!

My walking group leader put on a meetup write-up that we would walk “even in a gentile snow.”

My old boss was an Indian immigrant, and was famous for messing up idioms and common sayings.

Ranting about his wife who keeps calling him over details for their daughter’s wedding: “That woman, she makes me a banana!”

It’s not recent, but I once worked for a guy who did this sort of thing constantly. I kept a blog of them for a while, set up like a dictionary. Some of his more amusing ones:

Plutory = plethora
Inhenced = incensed
Duplicious = duplicitous
Conestayga wagon – Conestoga wagon
Feesis = feces
Menangeray = menagerie
Domasticly = drastically
Skintillia – scintilla

He also once called someone an “invertebrate” when he meant “imbecile” and said someone was “as old as Medusa.” He is an attorney. LOL

@picante Is he ESL? It’s one of the cutest things about ESL, messing up American sayings.

ESL is the abbreviation for “English as a Second Language”. Hence, you cannot be ESL. You can either learn or teach it, however.

Oh, my husband’s former business partner was great:

The hardwood supply company Lumber Liquidators became “Liquid Lumberdaters”. Every time. no matter how many times you tried to correct him. Everything was the “end-all-be-all”.

My old pastor couldn’t pronounce “Deuteronomy”, “revelation”, “irrelevant” or “spaghetti”.
“That rellevation in Dooter-ominy is irrevelent.”

He also insisted that “Habakkuk” rhymed with “Chewbacca”.

I hear a lot from my younger grandsons, age 4 and 6.

JLeslie, my friend is made in America. There’s no accounting for this speech/pronunciation oddity (I’m never sure how to label it), but it does provide many moments of enjoyment.

Nothing recent, but my son when very young used to refer to bounters. I think he was confusing counters and buttons but it wasn’t easy getting him to give up his word.

Well, it suffers from being translated into English, but today, my biology teacher wanted to say “Samenspender” which means sperm donor, but accidentally said “Samenständer” which means sperm boner.

Good Spoonerism from the bloopers of my comedy group’s latest show – ”...that is dectionately in the diffinary” (definitely in the dictionary).

@picante In a way that makes it even funnier.

@gailcalled Well, I use it in this case as English is his Second Language. Or, is English his Second Language. I think it was understood. But, thanks for the information.

A guy I know for whom English is not his first language was speaking about the “depthness” of a piece of music and I explained to him that the suffix was superfluous; that “depth” is already nominal and doesn’t need a further nominal suffix.

I see a lot of mispellings here on Fluther that indicate a person is hearing a different word than they are trying to write, but I can’t remember any of them off the top of my head.

My Grandmother often used to quote one of my fathers youthful inventions, but that is too old for me to state here.