:unintended novelties

So it was early in the morning and I was getting breakfast at the nest, and I realized I needed salt.  I walk across the room to a table where a girl has a salt shaker and I say: “Can I borrow the s…” and I think “I don’t want to borrow the salt, I’m not going to return it, I just want to take the shaker without being rude.” But the girl already answers “Yes” and begins to hand me the salt when I begin my repair and say “Can I have the salt?”  Not only did I perform a disfluency repair, but the girl had anticipated my language so much that I did not even need to complete the phrase I ended up repairing!

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So after my theatre class saw Macbeth last weekend, we were discussing famous actresses who had played Lady MacBeth, and Dr. Stylianopolous broke up the actress Judi Dench.  The second time she referred to the actress however, she said “Judi Wench,” obviously performing a lexical retrieval error, and was phonetically primed by the rhyme “ench” to choose a different word.  And considering that Judi Dench is an older, and respected actress, I just really hope there wasn’t alot of semantic priming going on…

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Yesterday, I was watching this show called My Big Redneck Wedding. The bride in this episode was in a touchy mood, and got offended when her groom said that she was “ingenious.” The groom asked why she was insulted, and she replied, “It means dumb.”

I can see why she interpreted it that way - it was really quite ingenious of her. She heard the prefix “in-” and thought it made “genius” mean the opposite, like in “intolerant” or “inanimate.”

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On the Diane Rehm show today (Friday, March 28th), Doyle McManus (who’s the Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times) was talking about the candidates’ foreign policies. I thought it was great when he said, “Obama…I mean Osama bin Laden”, since it’s the flipside of calling Obama “Osama”. This particular error is also anticipation, since the “b” is being prepared for “bin”. So I guess I’m just surprised that this error doesn’t happen more often than it does!

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I was on the phone with Verizon rep. He was setting me up with Cell phone/wireless and Fios for the house. We were rushing the conversation and going back and forth between features. He then asked me what kind of phone I wanted. I said I need the Motorola Krazer. It is really a Motorola Razr. The process made me feel crazy so I tranferred the consonant cluster for /cr/azy for /r/azr.

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I was on the phone with Ben Gurion University speaking with admissions and she was explaining the process and I was giving her feed back. I was thinking in French ‘bien sur’ and listening to her Israeli accent and I said in Hebrew ‘biton’ which would have meant of course if I had said ‘piton’. I exchanged onset phonemes /b/ for /p/ in production.

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SenatorPinto (10:45:34 AM): i slept like a dog

crazybeautiful60 (10:45:44 AM): is that good or bad?

This is a small segment of a conversation which took place online. However I still think it is a really good example of standing ambiguity, because I was not able to resolve the meaning of the sentence from the content given by the speaker. The speaker was not thinking that there were multiple ways of interpreting the sentence “I slept like a dog”.  As the listener I did not know whether “sleeping like a dog” was a good or a bad thing. 

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Here’s a case of linguistic ambiguity from a Reuters Headline last week, which I completely misunderstood and which took a long time to repair.

Normally, I think of the Coastguard as a unit that defends a country’s borders. When I hear of a military-like unit “striking”, I think of an airstrike, with bombs, guns, and damage.  When I read the headline, I was surprised to see that the Coastguard had begun conducting combat operations. It wasn’t until I got to the phrase “national minimum wage” in the 6th paragraph that the meaning finally jumped out at me!  This was a story about the Coastguard choosing to stop working for a while to bargain for higher pay.

I think this ambiguity was especially difficult to resolve because I didn’t believe the Coastguard was allowed to strike - in a work stoppage way. This was a story from Britain - maybe the rules are different in the US?

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I just finished playing a tennis match, in which there was a series of misperceptions in the last game of the last set.

As my partner started serving the ball, he stated that the score was add in. I replied (as the ball continued to come my way) that no, it was actually add out. All he heard was the word “out”, and so he failed to retrieve the ball (even though his serve was in on my side of the court). I figured out that he had said “add Anne”, as in a point for Anne, while I had misheard the phrase as “add in”.

I believe the high frequency of the saying “add in” contributed to my misperception of the given phrase “add Anne”. Also, given the context of the situation, it is clear why my partner heard the word “out”, assuming the word’s semantics to involve the category of tennis.

Since there was so much confusion in the last serve, we both agreed to redo the point.

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