Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

by Erard, Michael.

  Later, Wilhelm Hotopf took a closer look at the malaproprisms that Fay and Cutler had ignored, the meaning-related ones. (These were the second-most numerous in Meringer’s collection.) He saw that he could divide a small collection of 224 malapropisms into three groups. About 31 percent were complements, antonyms, or converses, in which people said “early” (not “late”) and “husband” (not “wife”). The greatest number, more than 44 percent, were “cohyponyms.” That is, they weren’t opposites but belonged to the same category, such as saying “breakfast” instead of “lunch” or “red” instead of “black.”*57 The rest were faux hyponyms (such as Monday-February or Asia-Japan). None of the pairs were synonyms (as in “wife” for “spouse”), and most were adverbs and adjectives; there were very few verbs. (However, Vicki Fromkin’s collection contains many verb errors, such as “a subject can be learned to change” or “different strategies that left to the same result.”) These are the errors we make when we call one friend, coworker, or family member by another’s name. I’m fairly certain that my mother doesn’t secretly prefer my brother over me. Then why does she switch our names? Because her constant use of both of them has activated them to the same level in her brain, which makes them both available for selection. The words, not the brothers, are rivals.

  Zwicky took the study of malapropisms one step further. Rather than deal with pure “knows better” errors as Fay and Cutler had, he took up what he called “classical malapropisms”: words that people used incorrectly but believed to be correct. He noted the guest who admired someone’s “handsome soup latrine” because he or she had misheard the word “tureen.” Another person said “cholester oil” for “cholesterol” through out a conversation, even when she was asked directly for the name of the substance. What Fay, Cutler, and Hotopf looked at were one-time accidents; Zwicky dug around in errors that occurred over and over. It’s often thought that malapropisms are made by people who (like Mrs. Malaprop) are overreaching their station in life. Though many malaproppers err with long words with Greek or Latin roots—the hard words, they’re often called—not all of their mistakes are long, multisyllabic Latinate words. Sports announcers, not necessarily known for their social climbing, often reach for a vivid word and say “arduous” for “ardent” or “periphery” for “paraphernalia.” A full quarter of the classical malapropisms that Zwicky has collected involve a vocabulary that’s decidedly untechnical, as in “it warms the coggles of my heart” or “the queen’s eclectic blue eyes.”

  These classical malapropisms are a sort of ossified slip of the tongue. A word is mispronounced or misheard once. Then an individual continues to use the wrong form, insisting it’s correct and often inventing little stories—what linguists call “folk etymologies”—to justify them. One reason why classical malapropisms persist in a person’s vocabulary is that one can conceive how, even in the incorrect form, the mischosen word makes sense. Take, for example, the word “lambash,” which is what came out when someone tried to say “lambaste.” There is a relationship between the sounds and meanings of the two words. In an odd way, “bash” seems more appropriate than “baste.”

  Zwicky calls “lambash” a type of classical malapropism known as an “eggcorn.” “Exercise regiment” is an eggcorn of “exercise regimen” “heartrendering” is an eggcorn of “heartrending.” A few eggcorns become fixed as a persistent conundrum of usage, such as “tow the line” (instead of “toe the line”) or “for all intensive purposes” (instead of “for all intents and purposes”). More circulate as in-jokes in families or groups of friends (in my family we say “phonemuffs” instead of “earphones” because that’s what my brother asked for when he was six or seven). But most eggcorns remain individual idiosyncrasies—your eggcorns will be unlike mine. What distinguishes eggcorns from other sorts of malapropisms is that they often make a kind of sense—though the eggcorn isn’t the right word, strictly speaking, it sounds as if it could be right. An eggcorn isn’t a spelling error (“definitly”), a hearing error (“quaffed” for “coiffed”), or what’s known as an “idiom blend,” as in “out on a lurch” (which blends “left in the lurch” and “out on a limb”). But something like “pus jewel” (for “pustule”)—which is an eggcorn—possesses a nearly poetic resonance.

  A group of linguists, Zwicky among them, who post to a Web log called Language Log (www.languagelog.com) appropriated the word “eggcorn” to name this particular type of malapropism. (“Eggcorn” itself is a twist on “acorn” when someone misheard “acorn” as “eggcorn,” then repeated it, adopted it, spread it, and when they were questioned about their misuse might have replied, “Oh, well, it looks like an egg, and it sort of looks like a corn kernel, and both eggs and kernels are seeds, in a way, which is what the eggcorn is.”) Eggcorn gems have been collected at http://eggcorns.lascribe.net, such as the line from the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch that says, “Meanwhile Richard Parker Bowles, brother of Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew, said that from the beginning Camilla approved of Charles marrying Diana while she remained his power mower.” There was the San Francisco theater review that stated “Bianca Marroquin, a real pre-Madonna, boasts an almost innocent tawdriness and brings a refreshing gamine quality to Roxie Hart’s need for fame.” (The first should have been “paramour” and the second “primadonna.”)

  Every social group seems to make classical malapropisms, says Zwicky, and the gems are repeated over and over, with speakers insisting their word choice is correct. “They’re astounded to discover that most English-speaking people don’t have the same history of the word,” Zwicky says. It may look as if we all try to follow the same standards of English and believe we belong to the same community of English speakers. However, the persistent life of eggcorns is evidence that people are connected to the linguistic mainstream more tenuously than they may think. Social feedback about language correctness is important. But what if it’s intermittent? What if the feedback givers are hesitant or, worse, wrong?

  Slips are often collected as if they were butterflies, singular instances of a colorful creature. “Each slip is a universe,” wrote linguist Annette Hohenberger, “and deserves being admired for its intricacy and beauty.”

  Yet for every slip you make, you will have said approximately 999 other words, and for every split second in which you utter a speech error, you will have talked for hours, faultlessly (or mostly so). This makes up part of the language ecology in which those single slips live. You also have a set of experiences with other speakers, formal education, and the written language that is particular to you. And you will possess varying sensitivities toward speaking and listening, as well as an internal monitor with varying thresholds for catching errors. When verbal blunders are considered only in a single flash or slice of time, we lose sight of the life of the speaker, isolating him from what else may have influenced him. On the other hand, we don’t want to risk imputing to a speaker a life in which he always forgets words, listens carelessly, reads too little, or misjudges his surroundings. I like the classical malapropism because it situates the verbal blunderer properly in time, in both the moment and the lifetime. It’s also more accurate to consider that you’re more than an utterance generator that trips over itself on occasion; you’re a person who learns words from other people, who themselves possess fallible ears and tongues. So you may want to think twice before trying to root out and correct your eggcorns and mondegreens. You may be erasing a part of what makes you who you are.

  At first glance, the work of Jeri Jaeger, a linguist at the University of Buffalo, doesn’t resemble Zwicky’s work very much. But over the course of her twenty-year research project collecting children’s slips of the tongue, she saw how slips reflected individual paths of language development and even personal preferences and styles. In 2004, she published Kids’ Slips, a 750-page tome that resulted from an innocent dinner conversation with a colleague who asked what she was working on. Speech errors from kids, Jaeger replied. He was surprised. “It’s a wel
l-known fact that children do not make slips of the tongue until they are seven years old,” he said. They don’t have mature motor control, memory, or language firmly established in either brain hemisphere, he explained. This unstable brain lateralization meant that it was impossible for kids to slip like adults did, in the sense of an inadvertent, involuntary accident by an otherwise expert speaker. Jaeger had already been collecting slips from her eldest daughter, Anna, so when she got home, she sent her colleague one hundred of Anna’s slips. She demonstrated that as early as eighteen months, children make slips much like adults do, in the sense that they inadvertently blunder with a sound or word they know. He replied that he’d have to revise his own ideas not only about slips but about brain lateralization, too.*58

  Linguistics may be unique among scientific endeavors because it’s so homey—eating dinner or watching TV are perfect venues for informal linguistic analysis, and observing the abilities of children is easy and fascinating. Over twenty years, Jaeger amassed considerable evidence comparing children’s slips to adult slips—1,383 speech errors of all types from the children, 716 from adults—collecting many of her riches from her own children. One of her entries lists a code name for the speaker, the child’s age, a description of the context (“while we were looking for a parking spot,” “explaining why he should be first in the bathtub”), the slip itself, and the intended utterance. To really pull this off, Jaeger used her intimate knowledge as a mother to distinguish one-time inadvertent errors from what a child gets wrong over and over because they haven’t learned it. Once Alice said, “She already showed me tomorrow!” When corrected, she said “yesterday” instead. This wasn’t a slip, Jaeger explains, because Alice didn’t know the meanings of the two words yet and was using one or the other randomly. Another time, Anna said, “And now I will appear my assistant, right under this table!” Her misuse of “appear” wasn’t a slip; children her age (she was five and a half at the time) often overextend what verbs mean.

  Anna is now a vivacious twenty-five-year old who is studying acting at a prestigious graduate program in the Northeast. If you saw her onstage, you would never guess the role she played in her mother’s work. When she was one year, four months old, she made her first slip of the tongue. She had a counting phrase—“one two three, one two three, one two three”—that she said all the time. On one particular day, she collapsed “two” and “three” into the same word. She said “one, tuwee.” Delighted, Jaeger wrote Anna’s slip down. Three months later, Anna was making slips more frequently, ones like “beek-a-poo.”

  Anna is a character in her mother’s academic articles. One of her slips, “not by the chair of my hinny hin hin!” serves as a title of one and her photo appears on the cover of Kid’s Slips. Anna remembers inviting her friends over to play so her mother could listen to them talk. With their parents’ permission, Jaeger might jot down their slips. She also listened for slips anywhere she found children (and willing parents): in supermarket checkout lines, in preschools, and, of course, at her dinner table.

  Scientist parents have long observed their children’s behavior, producing what became known as “diary studies.” Hippolyte Taine wrote the earliest baby biography in 1877, observing his daughter, whom he calls a “little girl whose development was ordinary, neither precocious nor slow.” The diary study became a famous research method—albeit a problematic one, if scientific objectivity was trumped by a parent’s love. Rudolf Meringer included his own children’s slips in Scenes from Out of the Life of Language, the English title of his 1908 book published in German. Werner Leopold’s observations of his daughter, Hildegard, take up four volumes. In the early 1980s, Joseph Stemberger kept diaries of his two daughters, Gwendolyn and Morgan, from the age of one onward, logging their new words and mapping their slips. In the annals of science, most subjects are anonymous. Not Gwendolyn and Morgan. They’re now known in university classrooms around the world because their father wrote down when they said “tweem-tweez” (or “cream cheese”) and “twap pweyin” (“stop playing”).*59 But none of these projects analyzed slips as prolifically or as thoroughly as Jaeger, who ultimately coded fifty different kinds.

  One way to study how children learn language is to note what children say, when they say it, and for what purposes, then track the changes over time. But linguists have been interested in a bigger picture of things, one that’s hard to build if you wait for each word to dribble out. If a linguist wanted to know how the words you know—your “mental lexicon”—are organized in your brain, she wouldn’t wait for you to tell her all the words you know. She would design tests, games, and other probes to catch glimpses of that weblike structure in your head. Slips of the tongue have been impromptu experiments to study adult language. Until Jaeger came along, slips hadn’t been used to look at how children become the linguistic experts they will be as adults.

  Scientists disagree about how many stages are involved in child language learning; estimates range from three to five. But regardless of how many stages there are, listening to a child’s slips of the tongue is a good way to place the child relative to the other stages. That’s because children don’t make true slips of the tongue with a sound, word, or other linguistic unit that they haven’t learned or acquired. In the earliest stage, children learn how to say individual words, though they don’t yet conceive of words as strings of sounds. Next, they learn how to say two-word sentences, acquiring the most basic grammar—distinguishing nouns from verbs, for instance, and arranging them in the sentence so that some action and some object or person are related. At the same time, they learn that words can be broken into sounds. Somewhere in there they string words together, often with simple grammatical terms, though they leave others out. Finally, at the stage in which their grammatical abilities take full adultlike shape, around the age of three or four, they learn longer sentences with words arranged in more complex, hierarchical patterns. (Even so, children by that age will not yet have learned to say “uh” and “um” like adults—they introduce sentences with pause fillers but place them inside sentences rarely.)

  Kids’ slips are shaped by these stages. Jaeger points to her conversation with her then two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Alice, about her bottle. “My stick…My bottle sticky. My apple juice. My sticky bottle,” Alice said. Not only does it count as a slip, because the first “sticky” anticipates the second one, it also indicates that Alice, who was trying to figure out word order, was in the second stage of language development. Because such slips are one-time events, a parent doesn’t need to correct them.

  From her collection of slips, Jaeger has drawn the best profile to date of the beginning of our lives in verbal blundering. The slips that children make involve the same linguistic units and the same grammatical constraints (that is, nouns swap with nouns, verbs with verbs) as adult slips. Like adults, children swap or substitute sounds or syllables from the beginnings of words and sounds that tend to come from the syllables that carry the stress. Only one sound error was unique to the kids, and it was extremely rare. Alice once said something that sounded like “coff timee” instead of “coffee time”—that is, the “ee” sound of coffee had jumped to the end of the second word. In Jaeger’s analysis, children learn one “ee” sound in words like “blankie” and “kittie” and another meaning of “ee” in words like “slimy” and “messy.” When Alice made this error, she was figuring out if the “ee” of “coffee” was one of those two suffixes. Thus, because adults know which words have the “blankie” and “messy” endings, they don’t make errors which move a vowel that isn’t a suffix.

  On the other hand, adults had two kinds of slips that the kids didn’t. One such error involved the stress on words. For instance, someone said “talks between us and Japanese negotiAtors” (instead of “Japanese neGOtiators”), or someone who says “reFERence” instead of “REFerence.” Jaeger hypothesizes that adults make these errors more often because of the Latinate words one encounters only in school. Another adult-on
ly error was word substitutions between words that are related in spelling, as when someone replaces “AOL” with “HBO” or says “K-Mart” instead of “X-Files.” Because Jaeger’s children hadn’t been to school yet, they wouldn’t make any spelling mistakes.

  One curious observation was the children’s high number of errors in which sounds within words moved around, as in “I want my blaceret” or “shunsine.” (Recall that adult sound slips tend to come from the beginnings of words.) Because one-year-olds make more within-word errors than two-year-olds, who make more of these errors than adults, this means that young children have a rougher mental plan for how words sound. With kids it’s almost as if the sounds swim around inside the words, which leads to more within-word errors.

  At the age of three, children’s slips become most adultlike. They have the sounds of their language, the ability to produce sentences (not merely two-and three-word utterances), and the complexities of words.

  Yet it’s a paradoxical age, three years old. Children at that age also slip most unlike adults—for instance, twice as many of their errors involve vowels and consonants. Joseph Stemberger found children at this age making more perseverations (“I brushed the brush”) than anticipations (“I catted the cat.”). Children also catch fewer errors of the “catted the cat” type, which suggested that their internal speech monitors—their blunder checkers—aren’t fully developed.

  They make more errors with function words (prepositions, articles) than adults, for whom these are automatic. Misplacing words in the grammar of a sentence peaks at three years old, when they are learning new structures for sentences. By five years old, they have more practice manipulating sentences, so they misplace the word in a sentence less often.