:unintended novelties

I was driving around with my dad over the winter break and the radio was playing “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.  The chorus of that song is “You’ll know.”  My dad was singing along and so was I, at least in my head.  At one point I realized that the words that I was thinking weren’t quite right.  I was expecting my dad to sing “your nose” as the corus. 

I think that distraction played a big part in this error.  I was the one driving and was just making a difficult turn in traffic, and so my mind definitely wasn’t focused on the words of the song. 

The words I was thinking of were in many ways quite similar to the ones in the chorus.  They start with the same letters, and therefore fall into the same sets of cohorts.  Also they are all one sillable words with similar sounds and silable structures.  But why the lexical item /nose/ was the one I chose from that cohort, I may never know. 

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Sometime in February, my friend was planning to go to the library but instead he said, “Bye guys, I’m going to the libary.” 

I pointed out, “Don’t you mean library?”

And to be smart, he replied, “Yeah, and Valentimes Day is coming up too.”

Most people rarely make these mistakes, but when we are younger and developing our speech patterns and learning new words, we tend to add, delete, or replace phonemes that break the pattern of the speech and make it harder to say, such as deleting the “r” in library and changing the “n” to an “m”.  Those syllable structure in library, mainly the “bra” is harder to pronounce then “ba” because you make the “r” sound with your teeth and when following the “b” it is harder to do an alveolar.  The same is true with “im” being easier then the “in”.  You are dealing with the same alveolars, and it is harder to pronounce most alveolars in the coda. 

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    I grew up in a family that both encouraged and enforced having eclectic tastes in music. As a result i have became a big fan of a lot of the lesser well known but still very talented bands that my parents listened to. one of my favorite songs is a Band song named “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” in this song there is a luric “Like my father before my im ‘a work the land.” since i was a young child ive always believed and sang it “Like my father before me Im ‘a working man.” recently my brother, who has far more knowlege on the subject pointed out to me that i was mistaken in my interpretation of the lyrics.

this misinterpretation works on one obvious level. the mistake must come from the phonological similarity in the two phrases. working man and work the land have very similar phonological characteristics. both have a /ae/ sound in them. also both have a end in an n sound. both also have five syllables.

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I was talking to my roomate last night and we were trying to think of what to do for dinner.  She suggested pizza, and I said that we should get “pika hut” when I meant to say “pizza hut.” I know this is a phonological error, but I am not sure why I would say “pika” instead of “pizza.” 

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