: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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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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You knew I’d get you. Now it’s a race between myself and the odd five other students that heard you.

During the ELS picnic today, Dr. Lorimor and myself were talking about summer plans. I mentioned that I used to live in the Lewisburg area (where Bucknell is located, and Dr. Lorimor’s new academic home). This summer, I’m actually going up to visit Knoebels (and the “k” is pronounced) which is nearby. I explained that it is a really fun family theme park and kind of a childhood memory of mind. Dr. Lorimor responded with:

“Is that the theme one?”

Yes… Yes, Dr. Lorimor, I just said that. But then she corrected herself to say “free one.” And yes, Knoebels is free to get in, free to park, just the rides cost 25¢ or around that.

Free and theme have the vowel sound [i] as well as start with voiceless fricatives, and she was also primed for it as I had said “theme” just before. And maybe even she was subconsciously trying to align to my word structure since she said the exact same word I had said back to her.

EDIT: Took out a reference. Didn’t think about it until I had posted it. Sorry about that.

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For a very long time, we’re talking 16 plus years here,  i was mistaken in my interpretation of the commonly said phrase ‘Holier than thou.’ in my ignorant and uninformed youth i believed the phrase to be ‘Holier than now’, this was always an intriguing phrase to me. because i never could fully grasp exactly the degree of holiness that now obtained, but seeing that people said this string of words so often i gave it the benefit of the doubt. i believed that if the masses could allow this strange and peculiar saying to be sensible than i could too. i went on saying ‘Holier than now’ im sure sounding pretty much as dumb as you can to teachers and fellow student. in fact im still a bit bitter that the cruel and soulless people around me took sixteen years to correct. nevertheless, one day i said this in front of a particularly affluent and equally assertive little girl. the embarrassing thing is that, as i have mentioned, i was eighteen years old, just a two small years from adulthood. anyway, this little ten year old brat has the audacity to call me out in front of a large group of people when i was at work, i looked like an idiot, i went through a brief period of time where i hated children and myself, but i got over it.

i would say that this error is both a comprehension and a production error. it is a comprehension error because i would have never been saying this phrase wrong, or at all, if i had not misheard it at some point. however, that said it must also be a production error because the actual error occurred when i was producing an utterance.

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In phonology class, there are lots of Korean students who take the class together. All students have to present their study one time in class, and the day was my Korean friend’s presentation turn. While she gave her speech, she said
“ …. and this circumstance was happened this circulation.”
The sentence was supposed to be “this circulation was happened this circumstance”. She switched the two similar pronounced words, circulation and circumstance. I think it can be an example of words exchange error.

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