That last error exchange is a great example of what we like to call “prescriptivist retribution”, which says that if you laugh at someone’s error (or correct it), then you make the same mistake yourself!

On a recent trip to Sonic (the fast-food drive thru), my friend and I each produced speech errors while ordering our snacks. The first error, that mad me laugh extensively simply because it sounded so funny, was when my friend said “Can I have a Butterfingle Blast please?” He didn’t bother to correct his error to the person on the intercom, but immediately looked sheepishly towards me as I began to giggle and repeat “Butterfingle Blast! Ha!” He had been attempting to order a “Butterfinger Blast,” but made a sound anticipation error, by anticipating the /l/ sound of “blast” and producing it instead at the end of the preceding word “Butterfinger,” creating the funny word “Butterfingle.”

The second error that was made at the infamous Butterfingle Sonic Trip was my own. When attempting to order a “Lemon Berry Real Fruit Slush,” I instead said “Lemon Berry Real Fluit Slush.” This is another example of a sound anticipation, as I was anticipating the /l/ from the initial consonant cluster /sl/ early, producing it in the initial consonant cluster of “fruit” by replacing the /r/ with /l/, creating “fluit.” The sounds “l/ and /r/ are both liquids, and since phonologies are similar, it is easy to substitute these phonemes for one another. This error has tripped me up more than once while ordering the “Lemon Berry Real Fruit Slush.”

My favorite speech error came when I made a really funny word substitution with a friend of mine. We were watching TV, and saw the rapper 50 Cent on the screen. We began talking about whether or not 50 Cent was washed up, or if he had gotten better since his hit “In Da Club,” which both my friend and I fondly remembered from highschool. My friend asked me, “What was the name of that cd again?,” to which my reply was “Get Rich or Die Crying.” I immediately laughed—I had meant to say “Get Rich or Die Trying,” but had made the substitution that evoked a funny image (in my mind) of 50 Cent weeping with a gun in his hand.

This was an example of a word substitution that had both semantic and phonological influences. I think that, since my general knowledge of 50 Cent causes semantic activations of words related to violence, and since I was primed by the word “die,” that these semantic influences helped spur my substitution. Since “trying” and “crying” are both extremely phonologically similar, with only the difference of the initial stop phoneme, this may have affected my substitution.

Basically, you ended up pluralizing a mass noun because of conceptual number - each person had attention to give, and because the syntactic frame would normally allow a plural noun in that place!