[Chris O'Carroll]

No 4223

Set by Leonora Casement
Mrs Malaprop is alive and well. Recently heard on TV: “staggering the line” for “straddling the line”. and “in retrospect of” instead of “in respect of”. We asked for prose that made some kind of sense but not what the speaker intended.

This week’s winners
A popular comp but we felt too many of you rather over-egged the pudding, putting in so many replacement words that any sort of sense or narrative were virtually lost. In addition, a few didn’t seem to know what a malapropism is: it doesn’t mean nonsense words (ie, “cuntrapontal” – you know who you are!) but real words, similar to what should be there. Hon menshes go to Chris O’Carroll for his “undisputed histrionic fact”, to Sid Field for “pass steadily [in the church] to the transcript” and to Brian Allgar for his carriage “drawn by four strapping mayors”. The four winners can have £25 each, with the Tesco vouchers going, in addition, to Nicholas Holbrook.

Roll over, Beethoven
Yesterday, I attended an ancestral concert in the newly-constricted hall. The audience were, of course, all in the crematorium; from rows A to Z, the acrostics were impeccable, and everyone had a clear view of the conductor’s odium. The concert began with Beethoven’s Erotica Symphony – ah, the agile tongues of the flirtists, the piercing cries of the strumpets, the brassy sound of the French whores braying in union, the tamponist lustfully pounding away on his cattle drums! The second half was the famous Filth Symphony: the first movement with that pungent little passage on the hobo, the slow movement consisting of a theme and degradations, the third movement which veers between two opposing moods and is called a “Schizo”, and that tremendous moment in the finale when the thumb bones erupt. The Beethoven cycle continues tomorrow, but I shan’t be going, as I really can’t swallow the Pasteurised or the Chloral.
Nicholas Holbrook

Reduce the budgie
In this Age of Asperity, encomiums are essential. We must reduce budgerigars in all government deportments. As an excusive party, we are all in this together. The tax cistern is overconstipated, the effluent have to constitute more, and we are tackling the tax annoyance that allows rich people to indulge their lycanthropy by giving to charities, thereby gaining tax confessions. Also they will pay more for their hot patisseries. Certainly the jobless are effected in particulate, but those not seeking work will be made illegible for benefits. Literal Technocrats and Preservatives in the coition will cut the rational debt to unmanageable contortions, but pumping money into the encomium (as reprehended by John Milton Keynes, and flavoured by the Laboured Party) is not the answer.
Derek Morgan

Complete stereoscope
At first Blair seemed to be the complete stereoscope of a prismatic politician, aiming just to protract the status quid pro quo from subvention by radicals and enochists. But in fact he fluttered to deceive. Beneath the Vermeer of modulation and sweet riesling he was a klepto Tory, about to follow in the foothills of Margaret Thatcher. Not only was privatisation a Holy Grill for him, he invented weapons of mass disruption to excuse attacking Iraq as a form of humilitarian interference, after consulting the unanimous Wisden of God and in cohorts with George Bush, the US precedent who many people misunderestimate. After passing the poisoned shoelace to Gordon Brown, he reinveigled himself as a world fibber of globule proportions. He earned his place among the anals of history for his simulating presence as PM and his erratic relationship with his barista wife, one so romantic it was cupiditous.
Basil Ransome-Davies

Detonate the money
Mr Malabrace was convoluted about his daughter’s future. There had been several illegible suitors, but they had all turned out to be inscrutable. For her sake he needed to fester some useful contacts, so he decided to detonate £250,000 in return for dinner at Chequers – cash for excess – it cost a bomb, but he hoped to be traduced to effluent people who might raise his social hiatus. It was a deliquescent meal. The PM, sedated at the table with millionaires deranged around him, thought it must be a cabinet meeting and kept passing motions, much to everyone’s embracement. Mr Malabrace decided to leave; all his sacrileges had been in vain because his daughter had meanwhile interloped with a defective in the police farce. The wedding recession had been a riot, then out came the kettle for a nice cup of tea before deporting for a romantic honeytrap.
Sylvia Fairley