:unintended novelties

I was talking to a friend of mine one day when we were having lunch at seacobeck.  He was complaining that there were no more forks, and I wanted to tell him to ask someone at the counter for one.  He was standing up on the other side of the table from me and as I was giving this advice, someone he knew was behind him trying to get his attention.  I felt rushed and the beginning of my advice came out as “Get one of their attentions and…” I knew before I said it that this sentence wasn’t quite right, and I even knew why and almost decided to stop and repair it but since I felt rushed, I didn’t. 

I think that this was a case of me pulling up a sentence frame and then realizing that the words I wanted to use didn’t quite fit right into it.  If I hadn’t been so hurried to get a sentence out, I would have stopped and changed my sentence frame–creating a disfluency rather than an error.   

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I was driving around with my dad over the winter break and the radio was playing “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.  The chorus of that song is “You’ll know.”  My dad was singing along and so was I, at least in my head.  At one point I realized that the words that I was thinking weren’t quite right.  I was expecting my dad to sing “your nose” as the corus. 

I think that distraction played a big part in this error.  I was the one driving and was just making a difficult turn in traffic, and so my mind definitely wasn’t focused on the words of the song. 

The words I was thinking of were in many ways quite similar to the ones in the chorus.  They start with the same letters, and therefore fall into the same sets of cohorts.  Also they are all one sillable words with similar sounds and silable structures.  But why the lexical item /nose/ was the one I chose from that cohort, I may never know. 

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Sometime in February, my friend was planning to go to the library but instead he said, “Bye guys, I’m going to the libary.” 

I pointed out, “Don’t you mean library?”

And to be smart, he replied, “Yeah, and Valentimes Day is coming up too.”

Most people rarely make these mistakes, but when we are younger and developing our speech patterns and learning new words, we tend to add, delete, or replace phonemes that break the pattern of the speech and make it harder to say, such as deleting the “r” in library and changing the “n” to an “m”.  Those syllable structure in library, mainly the “bra” is harder to pronounce then “ba” because you make the “r” sound with your teeth and when following the “b” it is harder to do an alveolar.  The same is true with “im” being easier then the “in”.  You are dealing with the same alveolars, and it is harder to pronounce most alveolars in the coda. 

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We were doing book reports in my education class the other night. When one of the presenters was speaking, he meant to say “book as a whole,” but he ended up saying “bowl.” I thought this was a rather amusing error. He blended four words into one by combining the onset of the first word with the rhyme of the last word. It was pretty funny that it actually ended up coming out as a real word.

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I was hanging out at lunch with my friend Whitney.  She was in the middle of studying for a psychology quiz and was looking up therapies.  Electroshock therapy is an infamous type of therapy and I had mentioned it in my own psychology class earlier in the semester, and so was the word had primed.  I was going to be smart and suggest studying electroshock therapy (knowing that it was a joke because it is for extreme cases).  Unfortunately the words did not come out of my mouth. 

“Have you studied enough on electro“th”ock she… Whoops!” 

I caught myself before I finished in time.  I had realized that I substituted the two voiceless fricatives at the beginning of the sentence.  Since they follow each other, it is easy to mix the two up.

My friend did not catch what I had done, but either way, the joke was lost. 

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We were having our RA Staff Meeting in Marshall Hall earlier in this semester. We were on the topic of nominating someone to commend as an outstanding resident (or something like that). I wanted to nominate a girl named Emilie, but when I opened my mouth, I said “emilate.”

It was a pretty funny splice. I guess it was in part because of how much I wanted to say “nominate” and “Emilie,” but it could also be due to how it’s similar to an actual word- “eliminate.”

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I was talking to a friend as we were walking down campus walk. I can’t remember exactly what we were discussing, but I was saying how I needed her to show me something. She replied, “Don’t worry. I’ll point you in the white direction,” instead of “right direction.” She immediately realized how bad that sounded and covered her mouth. She proceded to explain that “the white direction” is a quote from the movie Hairspray which she has seen about one hundred times. We theorized that she exchanged “right” for “white” for two reasons. Firstly, the two words rhyme and she did a phoneme exchange. Also, because she has seen the movie so many times, she was naturally primed to say “white” instead of “right.”

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First day of classes this semester and I was buying books in the bookstore. I had a problem with the register and they had to return a book that they rung up twice on the register. She was saying “books” so often that she got primed for it really strong. So when the transaction was finally done she asked “Do you want a book with that?” instead of “Do you want a bag with that?”

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I was talking with my mom one day a few years ago when I was first learning Arabic. I meant to say “I showed it to my uncle” and ended up saying “I shot my uncle”. Arabic past tense adds /to/ as a suffix. Take “ketab” (book) and add /to/ and it becomes “ketabto” (I wrote). I believe “showed it to” turned into “shot-ito” and interpreted as “shot” in English in the past tense.

All things considered, it could have been just a Freudian slip.

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    I grew up in a family that both encouraged and enforced having eclectic tastes in music. As a result i have became a big fan of a lot of the lesser well known but still very talented bands that my parents listened to. one of my favorite songs is a Band song named “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” in this song there is a luric “Like my father before my im ‘a work the land.” since i was a young child ive always believed and sang it “Like my father before me Im ‘a working man.” recently my brother, who has far more knowlege on the subject pointed out to me that i was mistaken in my interpretation of the lyrics.

this misinterpretation works on one obvious level. the mistake must come from the phonological similarity in the two phrases. working man and work the land have very similar phonological characteristics. both have a /ae/ sound in them. also both have a end in an n sound. both also have five syllables.

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