Since Vienna was a fertile place for the birth of psychoanalysis, it was also a natural place to find more than one way to dissect a speech error. Around 1889, another Viennese professor, a middle-class Catholic named Rudolf Meringer, began collecting slips of the tongue. With the help of a colleague, the neurologist Carl Mayer, Meringer eventually amassed eighty-eight hundred slips. Meringer and Mayer published them in a book titled Misspeaking and Misreading (or Versprechen und Verlesen) in 1895, six years before the first appearance of “Psychopathology” as an article in 1901, and long before Freud’s stature as a cornerstore of twentieth-century intellectual culture became a reality.
Meringer’s main interests as a philologist (“a lover of words,” in the ancient Greek, but basically a historian of written language) had nothing at all to do with slips. He embarked on his speech error project as a tangent from his other project on the histories of words. Other philologists looked for invariant phonetic laws that explained how, over centuries, one sound in a language became another. The prevailing view was exemplified by the linguist Jacob Grimm (who with his brother, Wilhelm, collected the famous fairy tales), who devised an explanation for how certain consonants changed in languages over thousands of years. Now called “Grimm’s Law,” it asserts, in part, that starting with the oldest Indo-European languages, the sound “p” became an “f,” the “b” became a “p,” and the “bh” (an aspirated consonant) became “b.” This is how we know (for instance) that the Latin labium is related to the English “lip.” (How the vowel changed is another story.)
Though Grimm’s Law said how those changes occurred, it was silent on why. Meringer thought he had an answer. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that language was more like a living organism than a machine. Following the suggestions of another philologist, Hermann Paul, Meringer went digging among slips. His reasoning was this: if the sound changes of a language described by Grimm’s Law were likened to an avalanche, then a single slip of the tongue might be the pebble that triggers a falling mountain. As a living system, language was prone to such catastrophic changes. If enough individuals made the same type of speech error, Meringer reckoned, they might eventually think of it as the correct form.
Meringer’s approach to the histories of words showed a similar sensitivity. Rather than show how sounds in words had changed, Meringer examined how the objects those words referred to had evolved. One of his famous examples was that the German word for the “wall of a room,” or Wand, had originally referred to walls made of mud-daubed branches twisted around each other. Hence Wand was similar to winden, the German verb for “to wind.” Another Meringer-style analysis is the history of the English word “hose,” the Dutch hoos, and the German Hose. All refer to pants (not stockings). The ancestors of modern pants were a three-piece operation involving the breeches, worn around the waist, and two stockings, or hose, one on each leg. When a single article of clothing was invented out of the three pieces, it retained the name of two of them: hose. Meringer appreciated ordinary objects like pants—he specialized in household objects and architecture, especially barns, stables, and houses, as well as bathtubs, furniture, kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. At the heart of his research lay a celebration of everything pan-German, all things of “the people.”
This was also the way Meringer and Mayer collected their slips of the tongue. They regularly sat down for lunch with a group of other men, most of them professors at the University of Vienna. Across Vienna, middle-class families were eating in their ornate dining rooms, but these professors were unmarried; it was their standing date, a lunch group for academic bachelors, but also a scene of ongoing scientific investigation. Nothing’s known about where they ate, perhaps a restaurant somewhere near their faculty offices, which weren’t located on campus but were clustered throughout the city. Wealthy Vienna had attracted talented cooks from all over Europe, and the cuisine they developed is now thought of as opulent and voluptuous. Whether or not the professors ate schnitzel or goulash or boiled beef, their meal would have unfolded, course after course, over an hour or two, giving them ample time to talk about the issues of the day. They conversed like divers bouncing off a diving board, each one waiting until the previous man was finished speaking before talking himself. Once in a while, one of the men would make a slip of the tongue. When he did, Meringer, then in his early thirties, scribbled it down.
Meringer and Mayer also collected slips from students, family members, and colleagues. Most of what they wrote down were only those that had been heard by two people, for scientific verification. Yet for all this slip collecting, Meringer’s evidence couldn’t support his hypothesis that speech errors caused language change—they were too diverse to produce changes as specific as those mapped by Jacob Grimm.
Yet the eighty-eight hundred slips, as well as his subsequent writing about them, made Meringer the first blunderologist of the modern world. He was one of the first scientists to show that speech errors are worth collecting and classifying. Whereas Freud used slips to get a handle on the self, Meringer used them to get a handle on language. He was the first person to do this. No one before Meringer had noticed that slips aren’t random, or that they are patterned according to the structure of the language, or that you could explain why they sound as they do by looking at sounds or words in the environment of the error itself. It seems obvious to us now. Even Heath Bawden believed that errors originated in the speaker, not in the act of speaking; in the self, not the event. To Meringer, a slip didn’t have a mysterious, individual cause. It didn’t take the shape it did because an individual had a pregnant lover or an absent father or an overbearing mother.
This made it easier to classify slips, which was another contribution of Meringer’s. He gave them names, such as the “anticipation” (Anticipationen) and the “perseveration” (Postpositionen), two terms that are still used today. The anticipation is sometimes called a “forward error,” since the slip substitutes a sound appearing later in the sentence. Meringer used the example of Sappelschlepper, an incorrect version of Sattelschlepper.
Conversely, the perseveration is a backward error, in which a sound stays around longer than it should. Meringer gave the example of die größte Börse der Wölt, where the vowel “o” invaded the phrase der Welt (the whole phrase should have been “the largest stock exchange in the world”). Both the anticipation and the perseveration could be explained by pointing to another sound in the same utterance. Meringer concluded that the source of most speech errors was the utterance contaminating itself.
Of course, some slips of the tongue resulted from interference by sounds or words that weren’t in the utterance at all. (They were “noncontextual.”) Meringer acknowledged these, which might come from another way the speaker might have said the same thing (for instance, colliding the synonyms “lesson” and “lecture” into “leksun”). They might also come from objects or names in the speaker’s physical environment. “My wife has called the dog with my name, Rudolf; I’ve called my dog Johannes, which is my boy’s name,” Meringer wrote. “My wife has called it Gretel as well, the name of our daughter.” His next comment gives a taste of how vehemently he would disagree with Freud about noncontextual errors. “What shocking light psychoanalysis would no doubt throw on our household!” he wrote.
Meringer’s contemporaries weren’t unified in their praise for Misspeaking and Misreading; some called it “hairsplitting.” A few complimented him, but many more were academic rivals who criticized him for publishing the names of the blunderers he quoted—what sensible Viennese person would want his indignities to be publicized? Meringer explained that he’d collected the names to be scientifically thorough and published them to make the point that everyone blunders. If slips were printed with the names of the people who said them, it was proof that his collection hadn’t been filled by a few particularly prodigious blunderers.
His insistence on identifying the blunderer anchored his observations that errors weren’t random and
that everyone slipped with a basic faithfulness to the rules of language itself. Only because he collected slips so methodically could he come to these conclusions. Actually, observing speakers in their everyday activities was something of a novelty for the day. “A researcher who cannot observe is nothing more than a bookworm,” Meringer once wrote. He was scrupulous in recording details, such as the speaker’s birth date, his or her educational background, the time of day, how tired or healthy the speaker was, and how quickly he or she was speaking. That’s how we know that 75 percent of the sound slips and 53 percent of the word slips he published in 1895 were corrected by the speakers themselves.
Another one of his observations about slips and their basic characteristics has also endured. In slips, some parts of words are more apt to be messed up than others, namely the first syllable, the syllable that carries the stress of the word, and the initial sounds of the word. Thus, in the word “reference,” the first syllable (“ref-”), the stressed syllable (“ref-”), and the initial sound (“r”) are the most prone to getting involved in a slip. In other words, someone isn’t likely to say, “Hand me that refer-mar gramence,” but indeed, seventy years later, linguists would notice that when one word was inadvertently substituted for another, a speech error called a “malapropism,” the two words often share a similar first sound, first syllable, and stress pattern. An example from real life: the other day my wife announced her lack of “injury” (not “energy”), which has all the features that Meringer noted.*13
Meringer’s speech error project put him on a collision course with Freud. The ensuing spat was more than a squabble—it addressed serious ideas about slips and competing ideas about the self, the mind, and what slips of the tongue mean, an argument that has persisted to the present day.
The disagreement began when Freud borrowed a number of slips from Misspeaking and Misreading and included them in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In an early edition, Freud credited his two fellow Viennese intellectuals and even singled out the philologist for praise. Speech errors did deserve attention, Freud agreed admiringly. Among the slips he borrowed was the substitution of “I will ask you to drink a toast to the health of our leader” for “I will ask you to belch to the health of our leader.” He also borrowed the narrowly avoided embarrassment of “I felt it weigh heavy on my sist—” with “I felt it weigh heavy on my breast.” (In the German, Es war mir auf der Schwest, instead of Es war mif auf der Brust so schwer.)
Though Freud took examples, he disagreed with Meringer’s analysis. Yes, anticipations and perseverations may be caused by sounds or words in the surrounding utterance, he acknowledged. They may also be caused by an utterance that was being planned. But he could not find a single instance of simple phonetic contamination, or so he claimed. Of course, he admitted, some odd substitutions do occur. But Meringer’s distinction between contextual and noncontextual slips was meaningless to him—both were made up, he said, of an “uninhibited stream of associations.” In both types, “I almost invariably discover a disturbing influence in addition which comes from something OUTSIDE the intended utterance,” Freud wrote, “and the disturbing element is either a single thought that has remained unconscious, which manifests itself in the slip of the tongue…or it is a more general psychical motive force which is directed against the entire utterance.” That that single thought could only be uncovered by “searching analysis”—psychoanalysis.
The philologist reacted with disgust to Freud’s rebuff. He called Freud’s book “a scientific bluff” and a “hoax.” He bristled at Freud’s suggestion that Misspeaking and Misreading was “preliminary work.” Despite his joke about calling on psychoanalysis to explain why he called the dog his wife’s name, he was incensed that Freud had used his examples—and then only a few choice examples of the many that he’d worked so hard to collect. He also disagreed with Freud’s analysis of the origin of slips, because he disputed the fundamentals of psychoanalysis and the repressive unconscious.
Meringer’s pitched battle against Freud took place in journal articles, letters, and newspaper articles. In 1908, he published another treatise on slips, Scenes from Out of the Life of Language, in which he ranted against Freud. At first, Freud didn’t acknowledge that attack—he was too famous to have to. In November 1908, Freud wrote to Carl Jung, then his disciple: “Professor Mehringer in Graz (slips of the tongue) is outdoing himself in vicious polemics.” (His misspelling of Meringer’s name is a cutting inside joke: a mehr-inger was an overdoer, someone who went over the top). Jung replied that he was “delighted” with the controversy. In 1910, Freud riposted in the third edition of Psychopathology, rebutting Meringer and admitting that he’d been mistaken to give the philologist any credit in the first place. This didn’t dissuade Meringer, who’d thickened his hide in other arguments, notably with Vienna’s architectural community. In a 1912 article, Meringer responded sharply that he wasn’t merely a scientific opponent of Freud’s—he also hated any supporter or believer of Freud’s.
But by 1923, the academic catfight was coming to a close, mostly because it had become a one-sided affair. Meringer published an article in his journal, Wörter und Sachen, that rebutted Freud’s explanation for every example in Psychopathology’s sixth edition in 1919.
One last time, Meringer argued that most slips could be explained through simple phonetics. He also noted that Freud must contort himself intellectually—recall the example of the forgotten aliquis—to explain slips even though a simple phonetic explanation was sufficient. Meringer criticized Freud for not having a method of explaining all slips, selecting only ones that fit his theory. For instance, when a slip of the tongue results in an obscenity, Meringer wrote, Freud believed that the speaker must be repressing an obscene wish. “With what right does Freud make his suppositions when in countless other cases of transposition and substitution, nothing offensive is manifested?” Meringer argued. He had a point—most everyday slips are so banal we overlook them.
Even in the case of noncontextual errors, Meringer claimed, the error still comes from speech, not the unconscious. “If a slip seems obscure to me,” Meringer wrote, “I immediately ask ‘What other thoughts were you thinking?’ From this method I’ve discovered regular ‘word vagrants’—the word image that swims through the mind.” For instance, when Meringer first went to school as a child, his father introduced him as “Karl,” his older brother, who wasn’t around. This type of slip was less important to Meringer’s analysis, but Freud (as Meringer pointed out) elevated it so it was the most important source of slips. Indeed, Freud wrote about a man who called one daughter the other daughter’s name, which proved for Freud that the man favored the first daughter. (Meringer didn’t report feeling ignored by his father.)
Finding Freud married to the idea that the source of the slip is some repressed psychic material, Meringer jabs at psychoanalysis itself, a “caricature” of a science, a “concocted faddishness.” About the interpretive acrobatics that psychoanalysts used to explain simple errors, Meringer wrote, “Freud’s method, or at least the way he talks about it, is certainly full of drama, subtle arts, and refinements.”
By 1923, forces beyond Meringer’s control or influence ensured that the battle would slide Freud’s way. Freud never responded publicly to Meringer again. Psychopathology had marked the doctor’s rise as an intellectual star, and by 1923, his star was high. The book had gone into nine editions and was translated into dozens of languages, which probably irked Meringer, who wrote in German and whose work has still never appeared in other languages.
For a while, it appeared as if Meringer’s intellectual legacy would suffer a permanent decline. During the 1930s, his Wörter und Sachen (literally, “words and things”) movement was associated with the Nazis, and his journal of the same name would publish Nazi manifestos. Meringer would not see this happen; he died in 1931. Academic gossips also accused him of being unpopular. By 1947, Edgar Sturtevant, an American linguist, was claiming that Meringer’s slip
collecting made him unpopular among his colleagues, a claim that has grown into a minor myth. The tale goes that he was denied a professorship at the University of Vienna, and rooms emptied at his approach. Given how delicately people feel about having their verbal blunders pointed out, it’s easy to imagine why the Viennese might have been reluctant to give Professor Meringer more material. After all, Meringer would take the slip and secrete it into a box. Submitting your blunder to Freud would get you a startling insight about yourself in exchange. No evidence exists, however, in any reviews of Meringer’s books written by his contemporaries that he was an outcast. He probably had enemies at the university willing to spread the rumor of a creepy Meringer. His view of language as an organism was not a mainstream view, and people disliked him for it.
More recently, scholars have identified slip researchers who appear to have predated Meringer. In 1979, Mohamed Sami Anwar, a professor at the United Arab Emirates University, described a long tradition among Arabic scholars of collecting errors, which produced over one hundred books, a pair of which were awkwardly translated into English as “A diver’s pearl into the errors of the elite” and “Errors of the weak legists.” The earliest of the genre was “The errors of the populace,” written by al-Kisali, who died in 805 C.E. These scholars collected many mistakes and errors in Arabic, from grammatical mistakes to slips. Because some of the books were republished in Vienna between 1871 and 1915, Anwar suggests that Meringer was remiss for not mentioning them, but it’s not clear that Meringer was aware of the Arab tradition.
Yet Meringer’s ideas turned out to be fruitful in the long term. His observations that slips were meaningful in the context of an utterance (less so because of the individual who said them) became fixed in linguistics and psychology. Given that his main interest was in word histories, it’s ironic that he’s remembered best (when he’s remembered at all) for Misspeaking and Misreading, a book that became a founding document and a guiding light for the linguists and psychologists of the next century who really put slips of the tongue under the microscope.
Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean Page 4