“YOU just made that up out of blue air,” my wife, Laurie Kennedy, said to me. Blue air, I thought, that’s a gorgeous image. What my wife had done, she had taken “out of thin air” and overlapped it with “out of the blue” to make, well, something better. Quite unconsciously. When I brought this to her attention, she said, “Oh, you’re so smart, you must figure you’re the greatest thing since chopped bread.”
Laurie, thank you so much, is not Mrs. Malaprop. Malapropisms occur when pretentious and stupid people affect a vocabulary that they haven’t yet mastered. My wife, by contrast, is refurbishing the language day in and day out. When you hear Laurie say, “I worked like a troubadour,” instead of “like a stevedore,” you think, “Yes … I suppose writing and singing lyric poetry are hard jobs, never thought of it that way at all.”
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