Decoding Mom: It Helps to Have a Bun

My mother’s voice was giddy. She had just returned from a restaurant opening and was checking in by phone. She’s 74 but sounded like she was 7.

She raved about the food, the wine, the décor, the flowers, the guests. On and on, cooing like a schoolgirl.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked when she finally took a breath.

She hesitated, then sheepishly uttered: “I have a bun.”

Me: “A bun?”

Mom: “Yes, a bun.”

Me: “A bun? Like a hamburger bun?”

Mom: “Yes, silly. A bun. I had two glasses of wine.”

Me: “Oh, you mean a buzz!”

Mom: “Bun. Buzz. Whatever.”

My own Mrs. Malaprop rarely drinks any wine, much less two glasses, but often mistakes one word for another. And the result is usually hilarious.

My favorite: One night she returned from a Chinese buffet with her brother, complaining about how stuffed she was. “We gouged ourselves!” she exclaimed, bringing to mind two senior citizens tearing at their eyes with chopsticks.

Then there’s the time a co-worker was telling her about getting a nut stuck in her throat. “Did they do the Heineken?” she asked.

Just last week, she helped me clean out a closet full of keepsakes and chided me for being too sentimental. “You’ve got a momentum for this, a momentum for that, a momentum for everything," she complained.

Mom's penchant for malapropisms began well before I was born. And she's a bilingual offender. Soon after my parents (both Greek) got engaged, my mom, who stumbles over tricky Greek pronunciations, held the requisite coffee for the elder ladies of the Greek Orthodox church. She faced the women and in her best Greek, asked whether they would like some sweets. There was a collective gasp. It turns out that the Greek word for sweets, with the accent on the wrong syllable, sounds like the Greek word for enema. I don't think Mom ever recovered.

So it’s no wonder that I love a good malapropism. Years after I hear one, I laugh out loud when it comes to mind. Some are so good they become lore among my friends, adopted into our regular banter.

“I can’t phanthom it!” we often say, in honor of the former co-worker who filled in the ghost for the word "fathom." And she did it a lot.

I like to recall the many callers at my former newspaper job, who complained about their local "physical court." I got a two-fer when they also asked to remain "unanimous."

I don’t even have to have hear a malaprop firsthand to love it.
There was the co-worker of my ex-husband who, during a meeting, chided someone for making a "mute" point. And the same man at the same meeting, after watching a woman eat several donuts, whispered, “Well, there’s no chance of her becoming dyslexic.”

I'm not alone in my malapropism fascination. A quick Internet search turned up some gems, many attributed to family members.

For all intensive purposes got numerous mentions. Others recalled talk of moving into a condom, people being self-defecating, writing off friends as persona au gratin, serenaded knives, civil serpents, plutonic relationships, nipping it in the butt and abstinence making the heart grow fonder. There was the man who gave his wife an organism. And the woman whose neighbor girl told her the story of Little Red Riding Hood with the phrase, "What big testicles you have."

My winner for the best new one I saw: "All the colors of the rectum."

Let's hope that my mother doesn't take up painting any time soon.