The word “manipulation” tends to exude negative connotations, but analogies are not always manipulative in a harmful way. Being nudged, pushed, or even forced by an analogy can of course have bad consequences, but that is the flip side of a phenomenon that is largely positive. The fact is, the interpretation of a situation is inseparable from the analogies (or categories) it evokes. Our categories are thus organs of perception; they extend our physiological senses, allowing us to “touch” the external world in a more abstract fashion. They are our means of applying the richness of our past experience to the present; without them, we would flail about helplessly in the world.
Where We are Headed in This Chapter
Although this chapter concentrates on how analogies manipulate us, it is a kind of microcosm of the whole book, in that it runs through analogies on all scales, ranging from unnoticed throwaway quips to monumental decisions that changed the course of history; between those extremes, it passes through categories that are awakened in everyday situations and that help us to deal with the commonplace events of our lives.
Perhaps the most inconspicuous way in which we are manipulated by our analogies is revealed by the speech errors that people commit when, to put it crudely, they get their wires crossed, as a result coming out with streams of words that are distorted and lack sense. We will show how the relentless pressure to categorize in real time is the culprit here, and we will also see that the phenomenon is not limited to language, since our actions, too, often betray the conceptual wire-crossing taking place in our heads.
Leaving the world of errors, we will then move slightly upwards in size and visibility, to consider analogies that people make despite themselves, and for no obvious reason. Such analogies arise without warning, usually lead nowhere, and nearly always are rapidly forgotten. And yet their very insignificance is, for our purposes, highly significant, as it reveals the ubiquity of analogy-making — how it is a perpetual activity of our minds even when there is no purpose behind it.
The next kind of manipulative analogy that we will look at has greater import, because it shows that a simple analogy can frame how we see situations and can shape our perceptions, our reasoning, and our decisions. The light shed on a situation by the analogical evocation of an inappropriate category can be so blinding that we are led unawares into cognitive box canyons, which can induce great confusion. To convey the importance of this phenomenon, we will show it in a number of striking situations.
When one is deeply engrossed in an activity or is powerfully struck by a very unusual event, the intense level of interest may cause a swarm of analogies to invade one’s mind uninvited, analogies that would never occur otherwise. This phenomenon reveals an Achilles’ heel of analogy-making, which is that it can lead us to absurd interpretations of situations, and thus to very poor decisions. And yet our susceptibility to making unusual analogies under the influence of our obsessions is also a source of great creative potential. To be sure, most of the similarities that we notice when under the influence of an obsession bring no great insight, but every once in a while such a connection can give rise to one of those miracles of the human mind that we call “strokes of genius”. Indeed, someone who is taken over by an obsession will see analogies to their obsession popping up everywhere, on every street corner, everywhere they turn, day and night, and each little thing that happens is potentially mappable onto some aspect of the obsession. And sometimes, though not very often, something exceptional will come out of this unstoppable drive.
Perhaps the most fascinating way in which we are manipulated by analogies, this time at a rather high level of cognition, involves analogies that make decisions for us, not only behind our backs but even, at times, over our dead bodies. This happens when we find ourselves in a situation where an analogy to a past situation is so blatant and irresistible that it simply forces itself on us, and we feel compelled to obey it. In such a circumstance, we find ourselves convinced, without rational explanation, that whatever happened in the past will inevitably also happen once again in the new situation, even if it conflicts with our desires or leads us to an irrational conclusion. When logic vies with a strong analogy, the “analogic” wins hands down.
And now we shall raise the curtain on Act I, which is devoted to micro-analogies that manipulate us on the smallest of scales, insidiously and incessantly.
Speech Errors as a Rich Window onto the Mind
In the midst of the most fluent native speech, intelligent, articulate speakers often come out with words or phrases that, if framed in print, would look very odd, and occasionally they utter sequences of words or pseudo-words that, if they were slowed down and highlighted, would make even a schoolchild snicker — and yet, since it all happens in real time and goes whizzing by far too fast for most listeners to pay attention to both its form and its content, seldom does anyone (speaker or listeners) hear anything in the least strange. But if one is deeply fascinated by language and thought, one’s ear is likely to be more open and more sensitive, and sooner or later one may begin noticing small oddities that for most people are merely parts of the bland background.
Thus it was for us, especially this book’s senior author, who for more than forty years has been passionately and meticulously collecting speech errors, and whose collection merged, some twenty-five years ago, with that of his friend David Moser. This book’s junior author joined the team more recently, and his careful observations add yet another dimension. The combined collection includes many thousands of errors of countless types, and a lengthy book could easily be devoted to it alone. In what follows, we shall have to settle for dipping into just a very small subset of it.
Theorizing about speech errors has come a long way since Sigmund Freud, but Freud’s ideas are still deeply entrenched in the popular mind. The Freudian view of speech errors is that they are a window onto the subconscious, revealing dark secrets hidden in the psyche of the person who blurts them out. For this reason, errors that manage to slip out despite the conscious mind’s attempt to censor them constitute a deeper, truer message than the overt, intended message. In short, a speaker’s innermost soul is inadvertently revealed by their “Freudian slips”. Today, this idea is still widespread but is not taken as seriously as it once was, and yet, if one interprets the phrase “a window onto the subconscious” in a less emotionally charged manner, it is still perfectly valid. Indeed, speech errors constitute audible traces (or visible ones, in the case of written errors) of mental processes far below the conscious level. Like animal tracks in a forest, they can be “read” by a careful observer and much can be gleaned from them.
After Freud, the field of error research came into its own in the early 1970s, with the work of the linguist Victoria Fromkin, who assembled a large corpus of errors and analyzed them as manifestations of unconscious processes. Significant extensions to Fromkin’s work were made by, among others, the psychologists Gary Dell, Donald Norman, and David Rumelhart, who developed influential computational models of error-making. The French psychologists Mario Rossi and Évelyne Peter-Defare, as well as Pierre Arnaud, have worked in the area as well.
The goal of our discussion of error-making is to show not just the diversity of errors we all make, but also, more importantly, how our errors reveal certain facets of the ceaselessly churning mental activity of categorization through analogy-making. The first few sections of our discussion will deal with what we’ll call lexical blending, an unconscious process that seamlessly but incoherently mixes together two or more stock lexical items, ranging all the way from long idiomatic phrases to monosyllabic words.
Rivals Mesh to Make a Mishmosh
I watched at him for a long time / Is that Buckminster Palace over there? / She grew up in a working-collar town / His research, now mostly forgotten, was an important stepping block along the way / I always carry my notes with me as a safety blanket / I’m thick in the middle of a major project / It was just a last-of-the-minute impulse / She always does things on the last
minute / It seems she’s having second doubts about it now / America has let its railroads fall to pot / He’s had a rough time this season, right out of the get-go / Please keep that into account / She seems very much up your wavelength / Everyone is just itching at the chance to see him / I should count my lucky stars / His campaign speech was such a pack of cards / She went completely off the rocker / Well, I can’t say that he’s shaking the world on fire / I have to share my shoulder of the blame / When I saw how many people had come, it just blew me over / Our old car finally bit the bucket / Let’s not mince hairs, please! / Okay, I’ll give a stab at answering your question / That’s the real meat and butter of their business / I slept till noon and woke up like a baby / I don’t want to be in any touch with that guy any more / He’s as loony as a tune / I didn’t know diddly-word about their plans / My son complains like a broken chimney / I was unaware of what went on under the scenes / Little elves darted hither and skither / I might be able to lay my fingers on it / As a teen-ager, I was hugely insecure of myself / I made a great speech error yesterday night! / Doug is crazed with salsa / She was hoping to follow in his shoes / I try like the plague to avoid people like him / We’re hoping to piece apart the details of the process / In the meanwhile, we’ll keep our eyes out for it / But for the meantime, that’ll be enough / His nutty ideas aren’t worth the time of day / They’ll probably snub their nose at you / The French turn down their noses at rosé wine / I wouldn’t fall for that trap! / I woke her up when she was just getting asleep / Hey, you did a really nice piece of job there! / In their eagerness to slander him, they stooped at nothing / That’ll surely lead you down a tricky slope / What’s up, Dolly? / Whoa, Betsy! / Well, for heavenly days! / Goodness grief! / Wow, that’s pretty something! / It’s going to be smooth sailing from now on out! / Give me a call when you have a time / And then I piped in, “Go for it!” / Oh, I kay — you’re probably right / His three teen-age daughters really run him nuts / I didn’t realize I was treading on anyone’s sacred cows / I bought the bullet on that one / It’s not gonna make a big deal, right? / I hope you can steer your way clear to making it to my party / My parents are breathing down my back / It’s no skin off my teeth / By then, the campaign was in high swing / You actually need magnifying glasses to read it / Some of my colleagues from even further af lung will be coming / They’re always touting Princeton’s horn / When she tried to say it in Italian, she stumbled all over her face / I have no problem with taking second seat / I was thinking how difficult on her this must be / The magnitude of the challenge caught me by surprise / They had to pull him out of there kickin’ and draggin’ / Watch what you eat, or you’re going to have a heart-a-choke / My cell phone isn’t within my hearsight / My mother is a bit hard of seeing / This new place is really my oyster bed / None of the profs would hesitate twice about consulting Wikipedia / I would walk through water to have my kids get accepted at that school / I tell you, that guy is one cool potato! / He was en his route to Singapore via Bangkok / I wonder what Bach would sound like to someone with a tin-deaf ear / When I saw his name in the paper, two and two just clicked…
All these blends are utterances that we heard and transcribed while listening to ourselves, our families, our friends, our colleagues, and also the radio and other media. Readers who are fluent speakers of American English will probably enjoy trying to pinpoint the contributing phrases (keeping in mind that the number often exceeds two).
Many of the above “mushy meshes” are humorous, and thanks to having been set in a frame and highlighted in italics, they may seem blatantly obvious after the fact. And yet in the absence of frames or italic highlighting, only a very careful listener will consciously notice clunkers of this sort, even when the two (or more) “notes” are played loudly. Indeed, most lexical blends are picked up on by absolutely no one — neither by the speaker nor by listeners. Strange though it may seem, fluent speakers generally “hear” only the idea that was intended, rather than the words that hit their eardrums.
Although lexical blending is seldom noticed, it is rampant, and with some training and some careful attention, any interested observer of language and thought can start noticing the phenomenon and writing down examples of it. Moreover, recorded speech can convince skeptics that everyday speech is in fact riddled with lexical blends that escape the ear.
Our error collection was launched decades before the Web existed, and of course we never dreamed that such a powerful and public linguistic treasurehouse would one day arise. By doing simple Web searches, we have come to realize that quite a few of the errors that we once presumed were unique events in the history of the world have been independently recommitted by dozens or even hundreds of people as they type up their Web sites. It’s quite amazing. Interested readers can do searches for various blends and find how often they appear. A few of the multifarious blends that we’ve collected are still one-of-a-kind events, but many are a dime a dozen.
Once one has gotten sensitized to noticing lexical blends, blend-collecting can become quite addictive. The great appeal of blends is the rich window that, taken collectively, they offer onto the mind. They reveal that behind the scenes, as people struggle to convert their thoughts into words under the real-time pressures of everyday communication, the analogies they make in the intense effort to simplify and compress complex situations down to their essences are in constant unconscious competition with each other. Although the frenetic competition more often than not results in clear-cut hands-down winners, at times it will happen that no one category is a clear winner, and as a result, two or more lexical items — the standard verbal labels of the competing categories — will vie with one another to get themselves uttered at the same time. In such cases, snippets of the rival items will get interwoven in the speech chain and thus will emerge strange, unpredictable hybrids like the many phrases exhibited above. We will now examine a handful of examples more carefully.
A Zigzagging Cognitive Pathway inside a Dizzy Dean’s Brain
One day while talking on the telephone, a doggedly determined dean came out with the following remark about a famous and admired researcher who was the target of an intense recruitment campaign at the dean’s university:
We’ll pull no stops unturned to get him to come here.
Smiling inaudibly, the listener at the other end whipped out his little notebook from his back pocket and transcribed these words instantly, lest he forget them, and ever since that day, this short remark has been one of our favorite examples of the phenomenon of lexical blending. Despite the many years that have gone by since then, this remarkable blend still affords us today a glimpse of the meshing and churning of the metaphorical gears going on inside the dean’s brain way back then.
Why did the ardent dean not correct this strange phrase that had popped out of his own mouth? Surely he didn’t think that “to pull no stops unturned” is a standard English idiom — so why didn’t he pause, backtrack, and self-correct? Well, exactly the same question can be asked about all blends and all speakers, for we all make similar errors that simply go unnoticed. Most readers will probably chuckle at many of the defective phrases that we have blatantly framed in this discussion, but the fact is that every day, every reader of this book, just like both of its authors, comes out with similarly flawed constructions, but since no one explicitly puts frames around them, they are not very likely to be noticed.
Two rival categories in the dean’s mind were the pull-out-all-the-stops category and the leave-no-stone-unturned category. The lexical label of the first category is a phrase that originated in the playing of pipe organs, and it means that the music will be blasted out into the church as loudly as possible. (A stop is a device that blocks a particular organ pipe, and thus the pulling-out of all stops means that all the organ’s pipes will sound.) Since first being uttered, the phrase has of course spread by analogy and taken on the meaning of going all-out in trying to achieve a goal, not holding anything back.
As for the second category, it
s lexical label alludes to a desperate search process in which something has been lost and one wishes to check in every possible place — under every metaphorical stone — no matter how unlikely it might be. Once again, the idea is that of going all-out in the pursuit of a cherished goal.
The two rival analogies that sprang to life in the dean’s mind involved seeing the faculty-recruitment situation as one in which a crucial and important goal was being pursued by every possible means, as urgently and intensely as possible. We can exhibit the roles played by the two component phrases as follows:
The numerals “1” through “4” show the zigzagging order in which fragments belonging to the two rival lexical items were picked out. Note that fragment 2 consisted not just of the word “no” but also of the initial consonant cluster “st” of “stones”, which coincides with the initial consonant cluster of fragment 3, which is the word “stops”. In all likelihood, this fortuitous phonetic overlap of the words “stones” and “stops” was a contributing element that made it easier to follow this zigzagging pathway, rather than some other pathway, weaving (or rather, interleaving) the two phrases into a single seamless-sounding output stream.
It’s not terribly surprising that both of these stock phrases were simultaneously activated in the dean’s mind; in fact, it seems so reasonable and even inevitable that both got activated that a reflective person would have to wonder, “If the dean got tripped up by two parallel analogies being built simultaneously in his brain and bringing the two rival lexical items to mind at once, then how come I myself have often managed to use just one of these phrases without getting tripped up by interference from the other one?” When you stop to think about it, it’s a little bit like asking, “How come skilled pianists so seldom hit two adjacent notes on the keyboard simultaneously?”
Surfaces and Essences Page 45