Brittany Pierce: Queen of the Malaprop 

themostrandomfandom:

I make no secret of the fact that I belong to a camp of Brittanalysts, including my frequent collaborator gleerant and the amazing thejollyape, who believe that Brittany S. Pierce is not only a certifiable supergenius not stupid, but is actually quite intelligent.

That being the case, I won’t even pretend that this is an unbiased analysis of her aptitude.

In fact, I will even go as far as to tell you outright: I am on a mission to prove that Brittany Pierce is hella smart just as intelligent as any of her glee club teammates, if not more so, based on what I view as her impressive linguistic capabilities, and I will use any tool at my disposal—including the Oxford English Dictionary—in order to do so.

Before we start defining Brittany’s terms, let us define our own.

A malapropism is an “instance of mistaking one word for another resembling it, often to comedic effect” (OED). The term derives from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s eighteenth century play The Rivals, in which his character Mrs. Malaprop has a charming tendency to misspeak. Linguistically, the word itself comes from the French phrase mal à propos, which translates roughly to mean “ill-suited.”

English language drama boasts a long history of characters using malapropisms for comedic effect, even predating Sheridan’s coinage of the word, with many of the best-loved comedic characters of the last four-hundred years, including some from Shakespeare, drawing laughs with their “ill-suited” words.

And the character Brittany Pierce belongs to this tradition.

In this analysis, I will list seven instances in which Brittany Pierce used malapropisms. For each instance, I will describe the word she said versus the word she meant, and then explain how her mistake demonstrates subtle intelligence. At the end of the analysis, I will argue that though some people would count Brittany’s tendency to misspeak as evidence that she is stupid, the nuanced nature of her malapropisms in particular actually indicates her impressive ability to retain language.

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    little contrived,
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