Bone apple tea, bon appetit : a Python-led analysis of English malapropisms posted on Reddit

Abstract

Malapropisms are real whole word substitution errors that sound absurd in context, thus inducing humorous effect. This linguistic phenomenon occurs frequently online and are specially noted by an online community on the Reddit forum platform, aptly named after a common malapropism, r/BoneAppleTea (Bone Apple Tea = bon appetit). This project hypothesises that phonetic distance is a crucial contributing factor in determining the popularity ranking of malapropisms on r/BoneAppleTea. By employing several Python-based resources and dictionaries, this project seeks to find the phonetic distance between the broad phonetic transcription of submitted malapropisms and the intended words. Two variants of edit distance were employed: Levenshtein distance and weighted feature edit distance. This study suggests that the weighted feature edit distance method is more suited to derive phonetic distance values than the commonly used Levenshtein distance. Furthermore, it is suggested that phonetic distance has a weak positive correlation to the score of malapropisms on Reddit. This study also indicates future areas of research regarding online malapropisms.