Rhetoric and figures of speech

The thirty-sixth entry is lo strafalcione, and the English for it depends on how the blunder was made. Italian has one word, and it describes nothing: uno strafalcione is a howler, whatever produced it. English has several, and two of them are people. « Malapropism » is Mrs Malaprop, who talks her way through Sheridan’s comedy of 1775 reaching for a long word and catching its neighbour — and her own name is the French mal à propos, badly to the purpose. « Spoonerism » is the Reverend William Spooner of Oxford, to whom the swapping of the opening sounds of two words was attributed, rightly or not, for most of his life. Both are narrow: the first needs a wrong word that sounds like the right one, the second needs the sounds to change places. Neither covers a plain slip, which is « a howler » or « a gaffe ». Italian divides the same ground by the moment instead of by the mechanism: lo strafalcione is the error itself, while la papera is the stumble of somebody reading aloud.