“I’m very ‘appy to get a second bite at the bullet” said a Rugby international, selected for England after a long absence, on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. I realise it’s a form of snobbery, but I cannot help finding the many-headed malapropism hysterically funny. I once went into a travel agency in Dorchester, and asked for a rough estimate of the cost of going on an 8-day safari in Rwanda.

“Right,” the manager replied, “Well, talking purely ballpoint here, I’d say around £6000. Of course, that’s just a ballpoint estimate”. I could feel my mouth twitching.

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll pencil that in”.

A close chum of mine in advertising had a client who was always doing it. “If I can just put a shot across your bowels,” he’d say. One of mine wrote in a letter to me, ‘It’s time your agency stopped passing the book”. He too was a serial Mrs Malaprop. ‘We need to raise the table steaks,” he penned on another occasion.

The comedienne Hylda Baker built a career on it. “He was lyin’ prostitute on the floor” was one of her best lines, and “You lead the way and we’ll precede”. I sat next to a woman with the exact same accent as Baker in a Lyme Regis pub some years ago. “My doctor says I’m psychotic,” she told the woman opposite. She looked very pleased about it. “Oooh dear,” said her friend, leaning back in a wary manner. The first woman’s husband broke in to observe, “Psychic…’e said yer was psychic”.

While working on a shipping account many years back, I was doing some post-cruise research interviews among American tourists. “And what did you think of the cruise?” I began. “Aw gee,” she drawled, “It was jest greeaat. But it’s, yer know, nice ter be back on terra cotta”. Another interviewee right at the outset of my career (in answer to my asking why she ate After Eight chocolates) explained that she was partial to an after-dinner aperitif.

“Why, murder’s the matter! slaughter’s the matter! killing’s the matter! But he can tell you the perpendiculars,” says Mrs Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, the character most people associate with the word. But Sheridan in turn derived the word from the Norman French term mal à propos, meaning ‘wrongly applied’ or inappropriate. Long before Sheridan, Shakespeare was also relishing malpropisms: in Romeo & Juliet he has the uneducated nurse say “she hath the prettiest sententious of it” (when she meant ‘sentence’). I find this awfully contrived and almost completely unamusing, but then I’m not a Shakespeare fan: I was, however, tickled pink when looking for examples yesterday to find this misprint on one site: ‘The many faeces of malapropism’. Shit happens and all that.

To round off tonight, I thought it might be fun to string a few of them together:

My sister enjoyed extra-century perception, and claimed to have seen a ghost upstairs. She sprayed the apparatus with a fire distinguisher – which, as an overreaction, has to be unparalysed in my experience, and almost gave me a cardinal arrest. She was a woman of small statue, but in no way a wolf in cheap clothing: she could make steadfast progress in even the most diffident circumstances. However, as nobody could collaborate her version of events, I chose to regard it as a pigment of her imagination.

Allow me to wish you a most enervating weekend.

Earlier at The Slog: Ah right – so that’s why we need Ukraines and Jihadists