I basically watch Jeopardy every night, and I’ve noticed that when they name their categories they usually utilize word play. Tonight the last two categories read as this: “Rated ‘R’” “For Sax and Violins.” I thought this was so clever, a very funny play on the phrase “Rated R for Sex and Violence.”
In Dr. Harding’s class we were discussing a play that centered around a massacre. Obviously this is a horrible event, and Dr. Harding was trying to find the appropriate word. He tends to be a person who stammers, and thinks and flubs his words alot. So the phrase that came out was “tragesty.” Clearly he had been blending the words “tragedy” and “travesty.” But the thing I thought was funny is after saying this word, he continued to use it, apparently unaware he had made a speech error.
Today, I was trying to come up with one disease which can cause very selective anomias. What I came up with was “STD”, “neurological”, and eventually ended up settling on “hepatitis”, although I was pretty sure that was not right.
I just figured out what it was - herpes simplex encephalitis. In class, I got some of the right semantic activation (”STD” - herpes, “neurological” - encepha…), and some of the phonology right (”itis”). It just took a little while to access the real lexical item.
Today I misparsed one of the front page headlines in the USA Today.
“DNA tests fuel urgency to free the innocent”
I parsed this as: Subject (DNA) Verb (tests) Object (fuel urgency) Adjunct (to free the innocent), meaning that DNA was testing the urgency of fuel in order to free innocent people. It wasn’t until I parsed the whole thing that I realized this didn’t make much sense.
The correct parsing is: Subject (DNA tests) Verb (fuel) Object (urgency to free the innocent).
tests is a verb much more often than fuel is, and I reinterpreted the plural marker as the 3rd person singular agreement. The headline makes much more sense with the second parsing, but I still want to go with the first, but this is a genuine case of standing ambiguity.
So I have a running joke with one of my friends that I am going to create a Broadway show that combines different songs and characters from different musicals that I like and I’m going to call it “Javert Get Your Gun” (that’s not the error, that’s just proof I’m a dork). So the other day I was humming a song from a show and my friend asked me what it was. I told her the name of the song and then proceeded to say: “I’ll have to figure out how to interpretate it into my show.”
I stopped. That wasn’t right. Interpret…. I think that’s kind of right. Directors have interpretations of shows. But I knew there was supposed to be an “Ate” in the word I wanted. After a few minutes of rambling my friend let me know that the word I wanted was “incorporate.” I wanted to incorporate the song in my show. This is a clear word-blend production error, as I took the semantic knowledge of one word and mixed it with the phonological knowledge of another word, to create interpretate
Last weekend my Mom and Aunt Carol came up to visit and take me out for dinner. We were extremely hungry, sitting around my room trying to think of where we wanted to eat when my Mom finally suggested Cheeseburger in Paradise. I immediately said I could definitely go for a burger and my aunt followed with “same could I.” We laughed at her error, as she had accidently created a blend of ”so could I” and “same here.” She did get her burger though.
I was just telling someone in the class what time the exams are due, and instead of saying they’re due at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I said the were due at 2 a.m. on Tuesday! That’s an anticipation error, facilitated by the fact that two is a number, so it creates a real word and fits in the semantic context. (sort of). I don’t think I’ll ever actually set a due date at 2 a.m.
Last night, I was on the phone with a friend who’d been in grad school with me. We were talking about the friendships you form in grad school and decisions some friends of ours have made to go back to school later in life.
When my friend said, “That’s why we keep our friends from grad school”, I completely misheard his intention. I interpreted the sentence to mean:
- That’s why we keep our friends from going to grad school. [Meaning: grad school is tough. Any kind person would try to prevent their friends from suffering like that.]
What he meant was:
- That’s why we keep in touch with the friends we made in grad school. [Meaning: you form close friendships during difficult experiences, and it's important to maintain those friendships past graduation.]
This error is both a lexical ambiguity and a mis-parsing. “Keep” can either mean ‘to maintain’ or ‘to prevent’. If it’s used as ‘to prevent’, then you have to prevent someone from doing something, so ‘from grad school’ is a complement of the verb. If it’s used as ‘to keep’, then ‘from grad school’ is just additional information that tells you what type of friendships you maintain, so ‘from grad school’ is an adjunct.
Both interpretations were facilitated by context. In terms of frequency, I can’t verify which sense of “keep” is more common, but I’m going to assume that the ‘hold onto something’ sense probably occurs more often.
Today, while having lunch with my friend, I told her about my conversation that I had had with my other friend who is studying abroad in Ireland. I said to my lunch buddy, “I asked Jane if she had any adapters.” I was talking about electrical adapters that you need to plug in American-made appliances overseas, but she heard me as saying, “I asked Emily if she had any doctors.”
After sorting out the confusion, it was easy to see why she thought I said “doctors.” She probably didn’t hear the initial schwa in “adapters” because it was unstressed. Then there were the corresponding d’s in the beginning, t’s in the middle, and rs’s at the end. Also, if I had specified the context a little better, and had said, “electrical adapters,” she probably would have been able to understand me better. We did, however, get a good laugh out of it.
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