I was renewing my driving license the other day, which necessitates a personal visit to the driving license centre to bring paperwork and get one’s photo done.

The chap that served me was a trainee, but he wasn’t a young chap, bright-eyed or bushy-tailed. He handed me back my old driving license, telling me I ‘could keep it for prosperity’. I mention his middle age because he must have heard that phrase, or something similar, a good number of times in his life. He wasn’t recycling it having heard it for the first time.

I let it go, after all, he meant ‘posterity’, didn’t he? I guess you could argue he meant prosperity, but maybe he either thought the phrase was prosperity or that it should be. One could claim that the old license could indeed influence my prosperity, but I’m not buying it, though I did buy the license, for a darn higher amount than I was expecting.

This is a malapropism I think, if it was for the former reason, where you mistake a word for another word, sometimes with humorous consequences.

He then took the old license back again to make a copy, but forgetting to return it to me. When I reminded him that he said I could keep it, he apologised, took it out of the copier and said, ‘yes, sorry, I said you could keep this for prosperity.’

He must have meant it then…