As I was preparing this chapter, President George W. Bush made a slip of the tongue in a press conference that perfectly illustrates how Freud’s approach differs from Meringer’s. Though the tradition of slip science inaugurated by Meringer offers a more thorough way of listening to slips, drawing on both approaches makes the slip that much more interesting.
Bush, who was defending his decision to go to war in Iraq by pointing to the signs of an emerging democracy there, said, “Who could have possibly envisioned an erectsh—an election in Iraq at this point in history?” A scientist explaining this slip in linguistic terms would, à la Meringer, say it’s obvious that the context of sounds resulted in a slip. Technically, Bush committed an anticipation—he anticipated the “r” in Iraq—though it might also be considered an exchange, with the “r” in Iraq and “l” in “election” switching places. We’ll never know for sure, because Bush caught his error and fixed it—a moment called a “repair.”
Such an analysis is probably accurate, but it’s perfectly unexciting, not to mention a wasted opportunity for political critique, if you’re so inclined. For color, we look to a Freudian interpretation, which, à la Morelli, might analyze the unexpected appearance of a word about sexual function in a political speech, then note the full (and more embarrassing) phrase that Bush narrowly avoided: “erection in I lack.” To a Freudian-minded critic, a man who feels sexually inadequate might be motivated to go to war to prove his masculinity. At that unconscious level the slip was intended, intentions that can be attributed to the individual. Freud might have added that it would be necessary to hear Bush talk about his slip—the work of analysis was for both doctor and patient.
The Freudian slip is a sort of poetry that tells the dreams of speech and illuminates the passages of a person’s thoughts and feelings. But speakers produce many more slips that are banal, a profusion that has yet to be proven meaningful in consistent Freudian terms. Meanwhile, from Meringer’s point of view, you can more easily sort accidents, pathologies, and evil intentions if you pay more attention to language and the circumstances of speaking than you give to the self. These ideas would eventually influence a whole generation of linguists and psychologists who set out to understand slips more thoroughly.
The first real attempt by a linguist whose ideas we would recognize as closest to our own occurred in 1951, when Rulon Wells, a linguist at Yale University, embarked on a study of blends. A blend is a type of speech error that combines two or more words, such as “lettitor” for “letter to the editor,” or “cumbersable” for “cumbersome” and “practicable,” or even two phrases, such as “he knows nothing at ever,” which blends “nothing at all” and “nothing whatever.” Wells predicted several ways that blends would behave—not when they’d occur, but how, when they occurred, they’d sound.
His first “law” stated that “a slip of the tongue is practically always a phonetically possible noise”—the blend would favor “scrin,” “scring,” and “scrill” over “ktin,” “pmpik,” or “ksob.” According to Wells’s second law, if two words have the same stress patterns, then their blend will, too. Thus a blend of “beHAvior” and “dePORTment” would have three syllables and a stress on the second syllable. Indeed, Wells had observed someone saying “beHORTment.”
His third law said that if two words have one sound in the same place, the blend will also have that sound. A blend of “maneuverable” and “removable” would contain the sound of “v” in the middle of the word. It would also end with “able.” Hence, “removerable.”
The next linguist to take up slips (apparently independently of Wells) was R. J. Simonini Jr., a linguist who, in 1956, exploited the cache of slips he found, not among his friends and colleagues, but in a popular set of records filled with “bloopers”—speech errors that had been broadcast on live radio or television. Ignoring the “malapropisms, illiteracies, indiscreet remarks, off-the-air remarks, innuendoes, double meanings, inebriated discourse, and uncontrollable laughter” on the records, Simonini focused on the slips for which Rudolf Meringer had first provided a terminology.
Simonini noted the familiar types of anticipations: the exchanges of sounds (“Here is the weather report: tomorrow, roudy followed by clain”) and of words (“And now, we present our homely friendmaker”), the substitutions (“When you try Phillips Dental Magnesia, you will find it makes an excellent mouse wash”), and the additions (“Ask to see the Ford Ferguson with the crow crap cultivator”). He also noted the perseverations, what he called “lags” (“a battle in the Belgian Belch”), those with substitutions (“You now hear the chimes of hysterical New York”), and those with additions (“the Russian freighter that crapsized in Portland’s harbor”).
These early studies of slips had to wrangle with Freud and the Freudian slip. No other theory existed to make slips more than trinkets and slip collectors more than hobbyists. That theory would emerge in the 1960s, when a paradigm shift in the study of language opened an opportunity for slips of the tongue to become crucial evidence for the hidden workings of the mind.
Neither Freud nor Meringer knew that in the one hundred years after the publication of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Misspeaking and Misreading, psychologists, psychiatrists, linguists, writing teachers, speech pathologists, computer scientists, and technology designers would turn to slips and speech disfluencies, counting, measuring, correlating, interpreting, collecting them in the wild and even provoking them in the laboratory, finding them in conference discussions, therapy sessions, radio and television broadcasts, telephone conversations, interviews with psychiatric patients, family gatherings, newspaper and magazine stories, town meetings, bars, role plays, lectures, and undergraduate seminars. This science has no name. But it has attracted people from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, rhetoric, English, computer science, psychiatry, engineering, communications, and political science. All these efforts share one goal: rather than ignoring verbal blunders, the researchers made them tell their tales.
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Some Facts About Verbal Blunders
Listening to verbal blunders more closely, one is immediately struck by the fact that they are about as ubiquitous as ants at a picnic. In 1930, three scientists from Bell Laboratories analyzed recordings of 1,900 phone calls to figure out how, exactly, business people were communicating with each other on the phone. They amassed eighty thousand words, a surprising 25 percent of which consisted of half-completed words and sentences, as well as nonwords like “uh,” “ah,” and “yeah.” They noted that exclamations (“yes,” “no,” “well,” “yeah,” “uh-huh,” “oh,” “all right,” “hello,” and “good-bye,” as well as laughter and profanity) amounted to about 10 percent of speech. “Uh” alone amounted to 4 percent.
Nearly twenty-five years later, when psychologist George Mahl began counting the slips and blurps of patients at his clinic at Yale University, he counted eight types of interruptions. He called them “speech disturbances”: filled pauses like “uh” and “um”*14 ; restarted sentences; repeated words; stutters; the omission of a word or part of a word; incomplete sentences; slips of the tongue; and something he called an “intruding incoherent sound.”†15 His tally? During spontaneous talk, one disturbance every 4.4 seconds.
The most common blunders? “Uh” and “um.” These pause fillers amounted to 40 percent of all the speech disturbances in Mahl’s sample. Another 45 percent were restarted sentences and repeated words. By contrast, the least common were slips of the tongue, which occurred a measly 1 percent of the time or less.*16 Since Mahl’s day, scientists have estimated that an average person says a slip of the tongue (saying “counterism” for “counterterrorism,” for example) no more on average than twice every one thousand words (in English, anyway).**17 One irony is that the slip of the tongue, the rarest of the verbal blunders, has had the richest career—speech errors have long appeared to humorous effect in literature and drama before spoonerisms ci
rcled the globe (in Don Quixote, for instance, Sancho Panza’s capacity for beatings and other slapstick is outstripped by his propensity to say the wrong word), and Freud and Meringer built their intellectual careers around them. Until fleeting disfluencies could be frozen in recordings, however, we hardly noticed them.
As surprising as these numbers may be, they also make clear that verbal blundering is integral to language, not something that intrudes upon it. Because human language has ways to deal with accidents and interruptions, they must have evolved alongside language itself. To take an architectural metaphor, one can say that a window is merely a hole in a wall—a lack of wall. Or one might say that a window is part of the wall that includes it. Verbal blunders more resemble the second instance. Just as houses don’t come without windows, languages don’t come without moments we can call verbal blunders.
People around the world fill pauses in their own languages as naturally as watermelons have seeds. In Britain they say “uh” but spell it “er,” just as they pronounce the “er” of “butter” (“buttah”).*18 The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh. Serbs and Croats say ovay, and the Turks say mmmm. In Dutch you can say uh and um, in German äh and ähm. In Swedish it’s eh, ah, aaah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a, and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh, m, and hm. According to William Levelt, a Dutch speech scientist, “uh” is the only word that’s universal across languages.
The ancient Vedic tradition defines the sound “om” as the primordial sound of the universe. Intriguingly, “um” might be the more accurate manifestation of the universe’s indecision.
While some languages fill pauses with a low vowel, other languages do so with actual words. An English speaker can say “well,” “so,” and “you know,” while speakers of Turkish say shey, shey, shey, which literally means “thing.” The Japanese say eto and ano, the Spanish este and eh. A Hebrew speaker says uv-xen, or “therefore.” In Mandarin Chinese, people say neige, which means “that,” and in Yue Chinese, they say ku, which can also mean “this.” Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong say tsik hai, or “equal,” and in the Wichita language, people say kaakiri, which means “something.”
Sign languages also have ways to indicate pauses. Signers usually look their listeners or interlocutors in the eye; to pause, they break this gaze. They can also freeze a sign. Wiggling the fingers is another option. A signer of American Sign Language is more apt to have the palms of his or her hands facing the body as the fingers wiggle; signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which erupted spontaneously among the children at a deaf school in the late 1970s, say “um” by wiggling their fingers with the hand they were using most recently for a sign.
The pause filler is so universal that even invented languages, created by hobbyists for fun, possess them. One such constructed language is Loglan (for “logical language”), invented in the 1950s by James Cooke Brown, a linguist and science fiction writer. Another version called Lojban followed. Lojban grammarian John Cowan says that a Lojban speaker fills a pause with a sound that’s called a glottal stop that’s tacked on either side of “uh.” (To make a glottal stop, say “I bet ya” several times quickly until your tongue stops hitting the top of your mouth to make the “t” sound. The resulting consonant, which comes from the back of your throat, is a glottal stop.) Lojban also has words to help a speaker fix an erroneous statement: like backspacing the cursor on a computer screen, the word si erases the last word; the word su erases everything a person said in a conversation. According to Cowan, the earlier language, Loglan, also used si and su until the “uh” sound was introduced to the language, as well as a simple “rrr” sound. Cowan jokingly says “rrr” invokes an imaginary god named “R,” who is the patron deity of hesitation.
This profusion of verbal blunders maps our life spans, which is a journey dotted with linguistic mile markers. It’s a blunderful beginning. Children produce many times more speech errors and speak at least twice as disfluently as adults. Ehud Yairi and Noel Clifton concluded that normal preschool children made an average of seven disfluencies every one hundred words. High school seniors, with an average of four disfluencies per one hundred words, were the least disfluent of all. In general, as children get older, they become more fluent. They also talk faster, not because they articulate their words more quickly, but because their pauses shrink in size and number.
But fluency doesn’t increase throughout life unchecked. Children’s speaking may become less interrupted and fragmented as they mature, but as adults enter later life, they begin to sound more like children again. The seniors studied by Yairi and Clifton (ranging from sixty-nine to eighty-seven) uttered almost as many disfluencies as the children, more than six per one hundred words. They say “uh” and “um” more frequently, linger on pauses longer, restart more sentences, and repeat more words than younger adults. How fluent you are at the end of your life depends on how long you live. The basic picture is that we learn language only to blunder with it, then the growing flocks of those same blunders augur the changes to come.
A different kind of research into another type of verbal blunder—forgetting a word that you know, what is called a “tip of the tongue” experience, or TOT—has also shown age-related changes. The average young adult reports about one tip of the tongue experience a week. As people enter their sixties, they begin to report two to four per week. (Yet you have probably done this all your life—children younger than three years old reportedly have tip of the tongue experiences, too.)
Forgetting a word certainly interrupts the flow of a sentence; it can also be embarrassing (especially if it’s the name of a person you know) and sometimes leads to social isolation. All adults forget names and proper nouns more often than other words, but older adults forget nouns for abstract things more frequently. (Psychologists who study the TOT state are stumped about why this occurs—they suggest that the young adults in their experiments, many of them college students, encounter more abstract nouns in their classes.) Men and women have the same number of TOT experiences. The question of whether they occur as equally to the highly educated as to the relatively uneducated is controversial. Donna Dahlgren, a psychologist at Indiana University Southeast, found that the larger someone’s vocabulary, the more TOTs they experienced. She believes that increased age isn’t enough to explain why more TOTs occur. Rather, older people have more knowledge about and experience of the world, which intrude upon their word selections. Meanwhile, Deborah Burke, a psychologist at Pomona College, has stated that TOTs happen as equally to the highly educated as to the relatively uneducated. This suggests that age, and age-related changes in the speed of finding something in memory, are major factors in TOTs.*19 Both explanations seem plausible, but it’s easy to see which one an aging population might prefer.
During the 1984 presidential campaign, the second debate between President Ronald Reagan and Minnesota senator Walter Mondale, on October 28, 1984, may be best remembered as the time Reagan wittily defended his age. He was seventy-three years old, already the oldest U.S. president. A debate with Mondale three weeks earlier had exhausted him, aides reported. So Baltimore Sun reporter Henry Trewhitt asked the president, “I recall, yes, that President Kennedy, who had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuba missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?”
Perhaps the question angered Reagan. Perhaps he recognized the slow pitch floating in the strike zone. His face flared. He swung. Hard. “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt, and I want you to know,” Reagan replied, “that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The audience laughed. (Mondale was fifty-six.) “If I still have time,” Reagan added, “I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don’t know which, that said if it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.”
His wit? Sharp as a tack. His ability to deliver a script
ed line? As good as ever. But his language showed his age—even as he blunted the criticism with words. In 1984, Reagan spoke more slowly, had longer pauses, and made more grammatical mistakes than four years earlier, according to Brian Butterworth, a British neuropsychologist who’d tracked Reagan’s spoken language in his debates in 1980 with Jimmy Carter and with Mondale in 1984. At seventy-three years old, Reagan spoke in more fragments of sentences without correcting or repairing them.
Butterworth also counted Reagan’s slips of the tongue: 2.2 per one thousand words in 1980, perhaps normal for a person under pressure. In 1984, they had risen to 2.6. A more significant increase was in Reagan’s pausing. In 1984, Reagan had five times more pauses that lasted longer than a second than in 1980. He paused this way about five times every one thousand words. He also spoke more slowly, uttering about fifteen fewer words per minute. Butterworth also noted “confusional errors,” or places where Reagan appeared confused by the question. To Butterworth, who’s not a medical doctor, these were signs of mental decline—well before Reagan was diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s that darkened his final years.
Not everyone agrees with Butterworth. To Susan Kemper, a psycholinguist at the University of Kansas who studies language across the life span (including a group of nuns, some of whom developed Alzheimer’s late in life), Reagan’s performance looked like the effect of normal aging, not the onset of disease. For instance, she’s found a sharp decline in the size of a person’s active vocabulary after seventy years old, and between seventy-four and seventy-eight years old, people rapidly lose their ability to produce complex sentences. The result? They tell more complex stories with simpler sentences, though often they’re embarrassed by communicating with such difficulty, so they talk less. However, this didn’t necessarily mean that they’re experiencing Alzheimer’s or some other chronic mental condition.
Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean Page 5