Although in most usages the words mall and maul sound alike (both rhyming with call), their contemporary meanings are quite different.
The noun mall refers to a walkway (often tree-lined) or to a shopping center or large building with a variety of stores. In downtown Washington, D.C., the Mall (or National Mall) is a national park that "extends from the United States Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and from the White House to the Jefferson Memorial" (Commemorative Works Clarification and Revision Act of 2003).
The noun maul refers to a heavy hammer used for driving stakes. As a verb, maul means to viciously attack and injure (someone).
Also see Word Origins and Word Play, below.
Examples:
- "The mysterious people who dwell in these valleys were out in force at the mall, in their windbreakers and blue jeans, their high-domed, billed bubba hats and their barbarically ornate running shoes."
(John Updike, Toward the End of Time. Random House, 1997) - "She held a Teddy bear in a choke hold; a giant gold lion lay at her feet. It always amused me when parents gave their children cuddly representations of creatures that would maul them if real."
(Camille Minichino, The Carbon Murder. Minotaur, 2004)
Word Origins and Word Play:
- The Origin of Mall
"The word [mall] is derived from the old French word mail or maul, which means mallet. A maul was used in the playing of the 17th-century game, pall-mall, pronounced pell mell, which can be loosely translated as ball mallet or hammer ball. . . . When the game went out of fashion, European cities were left with pall-mall alleys, which eventually became walkways, carriage drives, or bridle paths (the most famous of which was London's). Thus, in England, a grassy, shaded walk, or promenade, became known as a 'mall.' When English landscaping spread to America, English terminology spread with it."
(Christmas in Washington. World Book, 1998)
"By the mid-eighteenth century, a mall was any tree-lined or sheltered walk used as a promenade. In the 1960s, developers appropriated the term for their new indoor shopping centers that were designed to encourage people to walk around and browse in the shop windows."
(Paul McFedries, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Weird Word Origins. Penguin, 2008)
- Word Play
"[Robert] O'Hara's typical juxtaposition of contrasting ideas is also present in the title of [his play] -14: An American Maul. The play on words brings together the ideas of a horrific attack in maul and a traditional American staple in the homonymmall. O'Hara deliberately ties something American society believes to be harmless and benign with a word that connotates an intentional and gruesome act of violence."
(Johnny Woodnal, "Robert O'Hara." African American Dramatists: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Greenwood, 2004)
Practice:
(a) "[T]here was a decent restaurant in the modest _____ at the end of the main village street, along with a bookstore, a liquor store, a gift shop, a bank, a brokerage office, a realtor, a lawyer's office, and a gas station."
(Philip Roth, Everyman. Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
(b) "I was a mother now and all the terrible things that could _____ a child, snatch him from the world, had bared their teeth and trained their yellow eyes on me."
(Alice McDermott, Someone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)
Answers to Practice Exercises