On 8 January 1788, Fanny Burney recorded in her diary that a certain Mr Bryant, entertaining her with ‘good-humoured chit-chat’, had recited ‘a great number of comic slip-slops, of the first Lord Baltimore’. A ‘slip-slop’, she added, as though not previously aware of the term, was the accidental ‘misuse of one word for another’.**
The label slipslop was being applied to this type of gaffe in homage to Mrs Slipslop,** a character from Henry Fielding’s novel of 1742, Joseph Andrews. Mrs Slipslop mistakes fragrant for flagrant, virulent for violent, and speaks slightingly of the type of ‘nasty’ woman who is ‘a Scandal to our Sect’. Byron liked this joke so much that he repeated it in a letter of 1813, referring to ‘what Mrs. Slipslop terms the “frail sect” ’. And in 1800, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis—a writer of ghost stories, himself haunted by charges of plagiarism—would shamelessly drop a revenant ‘Mrs Slipslop’ into a play of his own. Lewis’s character is dreadfully prone to just the sort of error that marked her precursor, as when she says, ‘it threw me into such a constellation, that I thought I should have conspired’. Yet, as Burney’s remark shows, ‘the slipslop’ also came to stand as a concept in its own right. In an 1810 edition of The European Magazine, and London Review, there is a diatribe against parents who merely laugh when their children ‘misconceive and misuse words’. Instead, the author declares in furious italics, any ‘childish slipslop’ must be subject to ‘parental reprehension’ to ward off permanent, awful, infantine ‘oral deviations’.
Modern readers may find themselves comparably dismayed by a reference to ‘an identity spurned on by attachment and hatred’,** or by the remark ‘part of his remint will be to look at how points are scored’ (Daily Record). And what of this, from a university counselling centre: ‘A surface lack of interest in a subject may mask a deep seeded anxiety about future performance’? (Too true.) These sentences are bound to inspire charges of deviant word use, yet spurning on was perhaps being thought of as a form of reverse psychology; reminting conveys a not-irrelevant sense of renewal; and deep-seeded is if anything plainer than what it replaces. Meanwhile, could anyone really object to ‘financial debacles such as banks getting bailed out whilst offering the bailers poultry interest rates’? This is too bonkers to be provoking; and even here there may be some redeeming thought of interest no better than chickenfeed, or of chickenshit returns.**
Word-switches of this kind have long been referred to by most English speakers, not as ‘slipslops’, but as ‘malapropisms’, after the garbled speech of Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play of 1775, The Rivals. Famously, she speaks of ‘an allegory on the banks of the Nile’, ‘the very pine-apple of politeness’, and the like. But these substitutions, for alligator and pinnacle, are surreal, true out-and-outers, akin to the modern habit of mixing up poignant and pertinent.** A slipslop, by comparison, tends to make a modest amount of sense. As Leigh Hunt pointed out in an 1840 sketch of Sheridan, Mrs Malaprop is a ‘caricature’ of Mrs Slipslop—amusing, to be sure, but less believable.**
One can hold in mind this distinction between a slipslop and a malapropism without always being able to decide quite where the line should be drawn. In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare’s word-switching character Dogberry, in a typically foolish error, says, ‘Comparisons are odorous’. Though odorous may be being misused here, it preserves the bad atmosphere of odious. In 1674, an anonymous pamphleteer slating Andrew Marvell chose to improve on Dogberry by saying, ‘were not comparisons Odoriferous …’, a version of the joke later falsely but repeatedly attributed to Mrs Slipslop.** In 1830, a reviewer for the Edinburgh Literary Journal, comparing comic annuals, rehearsed yet another mutation: ‘In short, as Mrs. Malaprop says, “Caparisons are odoriferous” …’. Again, the attribution is fanciful, but now we really are in the realm of the malapropism, caparisons being ornaments or armour for horses.
A broad term for swapping words in this fashion is ‘catachresis’. Narrow the field, and you find that the slipslop, inasmuch as it is more plausible than a malapropism, is taken to be more insidious as well. After all, an error of substitution would seem to pose a much greater threat of sticking where it makes a degree of sense. There are numerous examples currently in circulation. A ‘steep learning kerb’ for curve invokes an abrupt upward step;** ‘parameter fence’ for perimeter maintains the sense of a boundary; to say ‘in cohorts with’ instead of cahoots still turns on a notion of fellowship; and ‘free reign’ for rein swaps the analogy of excess human power for that of an unconstrained horse. ‘Right of passage’, it is true, appears to bypass all the fuss one might expect from a rite; and grit to the mill, unlike grist (unground corn), would be a disaster for a loaf of bread. But ‘chaise lounge’ for longue explains exactly what the thing is for; ‘superfluous to requirement’, though surplus to requirement, is absolutely clear; and there is even half an idea lurking in ‘without further due’: presumably, ‘you’ve paid up; time to get on with it; no more ado required’. Being ‘on the right tact’ keeps to the general area of propriety that tack or ‘course’ implies. To say ‘when all’s set and done’, rather than said, will often fully fit the bill. Likewise using ‘in this instant’ for instance may end up making about the same amount of sense, as in this gobbet from a volume dedicated to the psychoanalyst Lacan:
The other example is that of the young homosexual when her father’s gaze falls upon her as she is holding arms with her lady. In this instant, too, there is embarrassment followed soon afterward by a passage to the act in which she jumps over the parapet of the railway line.
(Alexandre Stevens in The Later Lacan, Voruz and Wolf (eds.), 2007, p. 149)
These few examples are merely the start. Being ‘in the mist of a storm’ could be just as bad as being in its midst. When people speak of ‘no love loss’ between X and Y, the lost lost is hardly a loss at all. When demand or interest is said to have ‘tailored off’, instead of tailed, an agreeable hint of exactitude enters in. And being ‘streaks ahead’ adds the thrill of speed to the mere sense of distance conveyed by streets. Even the increasingly popular sign ‘All Contributions Greatly Received’ could be taken to impart a desirable flourish of gratitude.
Unlike malapropisms, which fall ridiculously wide of the mark, the slipslop or near miss tends to elicit much sniping from the public guardians of Good English. When parameter is used to mean perimeter, or mitigate to mean militate, staunch huffers and puffers can hardly contain themselves. In The King’s English, 1997, Kingsley Amis calls the fellow who uses infer to mean imply a ‘clot’, and bashes T. S. Eliot for using enormity to mean enormousness: to the suitably informed, Amis declares, an ‘enormity’ suggests a dreadful transgression. Simon Heffer, in Strictly English, 2010, speaks of the ‘obtuseness’ of those who, even as they ‘pretend to literacy’, confuse prevaricate and procrastinate.** Will Self, meanwhile, in a newspaper review, decries another critic’s ‘howler’—what he calls the ‘ “inchoate” for “incoherent” solecism’—scorning the misuse as ‘hard to square’ with the derided critic’s ‘quarter-century hacking away at the typeface’.**
A reader inclined to agree that the clot, the critic and T. S. Eliot were all disgracefully illiterate might nevertheless pause, mildly surprised, over another comment in this vein found in the work of Bill Bryson. He decides to offer guidance to those who, as he sees it, mistake being celibate for being continent, or ‘chaste’, by explaining that ‘Celibacy does not, as is generally supposed, indicate abstinence from sexual relations. It means only to be unmarried …’.** The same reader might also pause for a moment when Mr Heffer, on enormity, declares that it is ‘almost inevitably misused’. How does it make sense to say that a word ‘generally supposed’ to ‘indicate’ X does not ‘indicate’ X, or that one ‘almost inevitably’ used to mean Y is ‘misused’ when used to mean Y? Is it not true, the puzzled reader might wish to ask, that, in English, an error sufficiently widespread is an error no more?
Popular slipslops of the past provide an encouraging answer to this question. Redound, which from the late 1300s meant to ‘surge’ or ‘swell over’, has long since sheltered within the purlieus of a word coined a century or so later, rebound. Does anyone today give a fig about the lost, surging redound? Absolutely not. And what of brothel? In the fifteenth century this word was used to mean a prostitute, but soon after, it got mixed up with bordel, from the same Latin root as the Italian bordello, only to come out of the encounter with the meaning that we give it to this day. How many purists of our own time do we find expostulating about this switch? None. You may continue to have recourse to a ‘brothel’ just as you always expected to, with not the slightest fear of reproaches from them.
No, what matters to our purists is not the loss of a single word for a prostitute (there are so many others to choose from!), but the sight and sound of their own Good English being assaulted by those degenerates at the forefront of language change. When reading in a fashion column that ‘the search for the perfect trouser was illusive’ (Guardian), those trapped in Mr Self’s ‘guttering candlelight’ must wince and sigh, as certain that the reporter’s search was the opposite of illusive or ‘illusory’ as they are that it was in fact the ‘perfect trouser’, and not the search, that turned out to be elusive.** That particular quibble may sound like very small beer, but when another correspondent on the same paper explains that a dramatist wished his movie script about apartheid to convey ‘the enormity of Mandela’s achievement’, the huffers and puffers will insist on understanding this use of enormity to imply, not awe, but crushing disapproval.** The same unhappy effect is likely to be created by an advertisement for a rental property where the tag under a picture of the interior boasts, ‘There’s an enormity of expensively garnished living space’, though at least here it would be possible for both interpretations of enormity to apply at once. Also discomfiting to some will be the words of the writer Mark Lawson, who, in an article on his own work, manages to invoke what our advisers would interpret as the megalomaniacal notion of chartering, ‘hiring’, whole planets, rather than the more graspable one of charting or ‘mapping’ them: ‘I will proceed like an astronaut who, landing on a far, unchartered planet, tries to blink away what seems to be the reflection, in the window of his capsule, of a planted flag’.**
If we return to thinking about the fate of redound and brothel, it is surely reasonable to suppose that in years to come, pronouncers on lexical correctitude will have absorbed several of our current popular slipslops into their own version of Good English—a version they will quite possibly consider ‘streaks’ better than whatever parallel future English is destined to get on their nerves.** But this reasonable supposition about the future does not temper the grief of our own language guardians as they look about them today. Where a verbal switch is still in process, or indeed has only just begun, the most recent interpretation of an old word is bound to qualify in their minds as horrible: they will complain loudly and authoritatively that a useful fragment of our common tongue is at risk of losing its ideal meaning; they will despond as the word starts to colonise the meaning of the decent other word for which it has been mistaken.
Still, griping about misuses is not pure misery for the gripers. Mark Twain had this to say about a piece of writing he considered ‘hogwash’: ‘For five years I have preserved the following miracle of pointless imbecility and bathos, waiting to see if I could find anything in literature that was worse. But in vain. I have read it forty or fifty times, altogether, and with a steadily-increasing pleasurable disgust’.**
It is splendid to picture Twain enjoying himself like this forty or fifty times; but what if for you the ‘pleasurable disgust’ he mentions holds no great appeal? What if you are unbothered by the idea that English uses alter, and you blithely imagine that measuring today’s verbal novelties against any losses they may force on the language is likely to result—if it even matters—in a net gain? Suppose all this fuss about solecisms and howlers leaves you thinking phooey: can you leave the field?
The answer to that is, categorically, no.
Sometime before he was killed in 1593, Christopher Marlowe, in one of his plays, wrote the following line, to be delivered with an arctic sneer: ‘What doctrine call you this,’ it went, ‘Che sera, sera, / What wil be, shall be?’**
The same thought arises here.
Que sera sera, pal? Uninterested you may be; disinterested, never!** We all help to shape the language; it is just that in the battle for Good English waged ceaselessly by the gripers, your negligent approach puts you squarely with the forces of darkness. No need to enlist—you are doubtless misusing your words already; you probably chose sides long ago without even realising it. Well, if so, fair enough. And yet, if so, there is a question you really ought to be asking yourself. Why carry on in a state of partial ignorance, lobbing pebbles here and there, and being despised in return, when you could be disporting yourself with savage brilliance in the front lines?
If you were to put in a little effort, placing yourself in the vanguard of change, you would be sure to draw the fire of the gripers, and might even shield your yet more lackadaisical fellows in the process—those innocents silently done down by endless elitist opprobrium. We all know that a garish misuse, allowed to linger in the language, can come to seem less garish, or not garish in the slightest, just as the fairground colours on ancient Greek statues, washed away by the ages, reveal the gods and goddesses beneath to be coolly white. Shunt the battle lines of the language far enough ahead, and the humble old misuses that your confrères so resolutely favour will eventually be reclassified by your enemies as idiomatic; wonders to be celebrated; glorious and beautiful.
Should you set about such a campaign, you will find the armoury at your disposal to be huge: this guide explains the very best of its tanks, guns and bullets. But do not doubt that your fight will be bitter and long. You must steel yourself for what Swift called that ‘Rudeness much practiced by Abhorrors’,** after which, there could be no better way to begin than by running the gambit** of the misuses listed above. Indeed, just one of them would be enough to get you started. For it is a fact as remarkable as it is relevant to your new purpose that the griper has no mercy. Only resolve to prove your indifference to the exact limits of today’s Good English, and a single slipslop will ruin your reputation for ever. As Thomas Gray had in 1747, in his ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’, a work inspired by the fate of Horace Walpole’s cat Selima, ‘Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved’—and so in the battle that faces you now. If you feel ready for the fray, are undaunted by your foes and have even the poultriest reserves of will to dedicate to the cause, then it is past time for your assault on the English language to begin.