the bowl report
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.
I imagine the possibility of creating a real word probably encouraged this error to happen.
I don’t think this was a blend as much as a substitution. It wasn’t that he blended those two words and the other two got squeezed out. Instead he was trying to say book and got his codas mixed up, but caught the error before he could continue to the words “as a.”
You’re right, Jason, in that blends don’t have to “delete” intervening materials. You could have a blend of “book” and “whole” without having to worry about where the intervening material went. The vowels differ between these two words, and from your description, it sounds like the vowel matches with “whole”. So perhaps we could better describe this as the onset of “book” plus the rime of “whole”, which either could be analyzed as a blend or as a substitution error assisted by the fact that “bowl” is a real word.
Would a possible alternate syntactic plan have been “whole book”? That would have made a blend much more likely!