Mrs Malaprop 🔒 Members

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Age and build

The book is silent here, so we keep this plain and neutral.

Face and hair

The book is silent here, so we keep this plain and neutral.

Dress

The book is silent here, so we keep this plain and neutral.

Voice and speech

Habitually misapplies words with confident solemnity

“select words so ingeniously misapplied, without being mispronounced” (The Rivals, part 2)

Speaks in malapropisms and verbal blunders throughout

“a nice derangement of epitaphs” (The Rivals, part 8)

Uses elaborate, often incorrect vocabulary

“it gives me the hydrostatics to such a degree” (The Rivals, part 8)

Signature words

Emphatic assertion of propriety

“o' my conscience” (The Rivals, part 8)

O Lud

“O Lud! Sir Anthony!—a new light breaks in upon me” (The Rivals, part 11)

Fy, fy

“Fy, fy, Sir Anthony! you surely speak laconically” (The Rivals, part 3)

O mercy

“O mercy!—was it you that reflected on my parts of speech” (The Rivals, part 11)

Gait and mannerisms

Eavesdrops on her niece's conversations

“I am impatient to know how the little hussy deports herself” (The Rivals, part 8)

Interrupts and chides Lydia repeatedly

“Hussy! I'll choke the word in your throat!—come along—come along” (The Rivals, part 9)

Makes asides while observing others

“Aside.] Very dutiful, upon my word” (The Rivals, part 9)

Strengths

Exercises firm authority over her niece

“thought does not become a young woman” (The Rivals, part 2)

Confident in her own judgment and taste

“I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue” (The Rivals, part 8)

Resourceful in managing household and family affairs

“I shall give Mr. Acres his discharge, and prepare Lydia to receive your son's invocations” (The Rivals, part 3)

Flaws

Systematically misuses words while claiming erudition

“I would never let her meddle with Greek, or Hebrew, or algebra, or simony, or fluxions, or paradoxes” (The Rivals, part 3)

Tyrannical toward her niece despite professed concern

“You are fit company for nothing but your own ill-humours” (The Rivals, part 3)

Vain and susceptible to flattery

“He is the very pine-apple of politeness” (The Rivals, part 8)

Pursues her own romantic interests while controlling Lydia's

“She has somehow discovered my partiality for Sir Lucius O'Trigger” (The Rivals, part 3)

Traits

Pedantic and self-important about learning

“I would send her, at nine years old, to a boarding-school, in order to learn a little ingenuity and artifice” (The Rivals, part 3)

Disapproves of novels and circulating libraries

“Those are vile places, indeed” (The Rivals, part 3)

Believes severity is proper child-rearing

“nothing is so conciliating to young people as severity” (The Rivals, part 3)

Susceptible to schemes and manipulation

“I am delighted with the scheme; never was anything better perpetrated” (The Rivals, part 8)

Lines in their own words

On Lydia's disobedience

“You thought, miss! I don't know any business you have to think at all—thought does not become a young woman” (The Rivals, part 2)

On forgetting unwanted attachments

“there is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it” (The Rivals, part 2)

On her educational ideals

“she should be mistress of orthodoxy, that she might not mis-spell, and mis-pronounce words so shamefully as girls usually do” (The Rivals, part 3)

On Captain Absolute's appearance

“His physiognomy so grammatical! Then his presence is so noble” (The Rivals, part 11)

On discovering the deception

“O mercy!—was it you that reflected on my parts of speech” (The Rivals, part 11)

her famous mangled words

“it gives me the hydrostatics to such a degree” (The Rivals, part 8)

praising Captain Absolute

“He is the very pine-apple of politeness” (The Rivals, part 8)

on Lydia

“she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile” (The Rivals, part 9)

on her own speech

“it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs” (The Rivals, part 8)