“Th”ock “Sh”erapy
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.
I wonder if this means that you productively combined electro + shock, since onsets of words tend to exchange with other onsets (making ‘electro’ an affix).