:unintended novelties

On the Diane Rehm show today (Friday, March 28th), Doyle McManus (who’s the Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times) was talking about the candidates’ foreign policies. I thought it was great when he said, “Obama…I mean Osama bin Laden”, since it’s the flipside of calling Obama “Osama”. This particular error is also anticipation, since the “b” is being prepared for “bin”. So I guess I’m just surprised that this error doesn’t happen more often than it does!

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I was just telling someone in the class what time the exams are due, and instead of saying they’re due at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I said the were due at 2 a.m. on Tuesday! That’s an anticipation error, facilitated by the fact that two is a number, so it creates a real word and fits in the semantic context. (sort of). I don’t think I’ll ever actually set a due date at 2 a.m.

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