Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
Page 25
Return to text.
*49It didn’t remain current for long; other models, built on speech errors, superseded it.
Return to text.
*50Most recently it was located at http://sun02.mpi.nl/cgi-bin/sedb/sperco_form4.pl.
Return to text.
*51Pianists, even highly skilled ones in rehearsed musical performances, often play the wrong note. In one study of expert piano performance, by Caroline Palmer, a cognitive scientist at McGill University, when pianists played familiar, memorized musical pieces, they played the note too early. When they sight-read but added emotional or stylistic inflections, they played notes too late. Like slips of the tongue, slips of the keyboard occur within musical phrases or at their boundaries, which suggests that musicians plan and execute their playing in discrete lengths. Also, if the melody is controlled with two separate hands, then the musicians typically had more errors on the low notes, or those played with the left hand—Western piano music gives a musical advantage to the outer fingers of the right hand.
Return to text.
*52When asked about radio identification tags on vehicles that send a “don’t shoot” command to targeting systems, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned against a technological panacea. “There have been friendly fire incidents in every war in the history of mankind,” he said. “Human beings are human beings, and things are going to happen.”
Return to text.
*53The OED lists “malaproipism” as another form of “malaprop” or “malapropism” that evidently never caught on.
Return to text.
†54Characters who comment on her malapropisms are also mistreated in the play—Captain Absolute is raked over Mrs. Malaprop’s coals when she finds out he’s made fun of her language. Pity Mr. Malaprop.
Return to text.
*55The Blockheads, from 1776, is usually attributed to Mercy Warren; The Better Sort: Or the Girl of Spirit was written by William Hill Brown and first performed in 1789.
Return to text.
*56Not by much, Fay and Cutler claimed. Semantic malapropisms made up only 54 percent of their collection; the remaining 46 percent were related by sound.
Return to text.
*57A hyponym is a relationship between two words in which the meaning of the first is included in that of the second. Any dog or any cat is also an animal; therefore the words “dog” and “cat” are hyponyms and are cohyponyms of “animals.”
Return to text.
*58Jaeger’s work put another nail in the coffin on Freudian explanations for slips. As late as the 1980s, some Freudians still maintained that children were too young to suffer the emotional repressions that caused slips of the tongue.
Return to text.
*59Or in the phonetic notation, “thwiimthwiiz” and “thwap phweyin.”
Return to text.
*60The incident for which Quayle may be most remembered occurred in June 1992, when Quayle participated in a mock spelling bee at an elementary school in South Trenton, New Jersey. When twelve-year-old William Figueroa, spelled “p-o-t-a-t-o,” Quayle corrected him and spelled it “p-o-t-at-o-e.” Figueroa gained brief notoriety as the “potato kid.” Quayle’s infamy has been longer lived.
Return to text.
*61Writing for The New Republic, Jesse Furman starts his piece about Bush’s language with this tangle: “Is it too early in—well, thanks for those kind words. But is it too early to ask the commissioners—are you beginning—of course, the commission’s been, what, in effect seventy days or something like that, seventy-seven days—traveled to many states, which I think is very important, because I think it’s important that when the report comes in, it has a national concept to it, that it isn’t regional in any sense.”
Return to text.
†62Furman quotes neurological experts who warn him that not everyone with aphasic symptoms—frequent grammatical errors, tip-of-the-tongue experiences, and malapropisms—is aphasic. Throwing these warnings aside, Furman, a journalist, apparently felt no embarrassment offering his own diagnosis that Bush’s speech revealed a pathological disturbance.
Return to text.
*63One thinks of Senator Charles Sumner’s 1856 speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” an antislavery speech that was also a personal attack against the South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler. Because Butler had recently suffered a stroke, Sumner’s accusation that Butler had spoken “with incoherent phrases, discharged the loose expectoration of his speech” was particularly offensive. The beating of Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks on the Senate floor—and the cheering of the beating among Southerners—is noted as the first sign of violent civil war.
Return to text.
*64It’s a notable irony that a president chewing out a reporter for transcribing exact words was apparently captured verbatim. George W. Bush is followed by a small army of court reporters who transcribe his every word; some of them work for the White House, others for media organizations, and yet others are freelancers. Journalists on daily deadlines check their quotes against these transcripts, not against their own notes or recordings, even though the transcripts have been “cleaned up” according to what court reporters are trained to do.
Return to text.
*65Based on one slip per thousand words, and a range of words spoken per day of 7,500 to 22,500.
Return to text.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Erard
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Erard, Michael.
Um—slips, stumbles, and verbal blunders, and what they mean / Michael Erard.
p. cm.
1. Speech errors. I. Title. II. Title: Slips, stumbles, and verbal blunders, and what they mean.
P37.5.S67E73 2007
401'.9—dc22 2006103208
www.pantheonbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-42515-8
v3.0