Surfaces and Essences

  Striking Two Notes at Once on the Keyboard of Concepts

  As a matter of fact, beginning pianists do make such errors all the time, to their frustration, but gradually they figure out techniques that allow their fingers to plunk themselves down on just the one note that is needed, despite the extreme nearness of other notes. This is a kind of small motoric miracle that we will not attempt to explain, but it serves to make readers aware that, quite analogously, there is a small categoric miracle going on every time that we come out with an uncorrupted word or phrase. We usually come out with that word or phrase alone, pure and uncontaminated, not blended with any of its semantic near-neighbors. But how is it that our “mental fingers” almost never strike two neighboring “notes” at once?

  In truth, our mental fingers often do strike two notes at once, activating two or more rival categories. As a result, human speech is peppered with all sorts of tiny defects that are lingering traces of the silent battle raging behind the scenes. If one pays very close attention to any native speaker of any language, one will hear slightly deformed vowels, slightly prolonged consonants, voiced consonants that should actually be unvoiced (or vice versa), slight pauses between words, and many other subtle phonetic distortions, all of which are surface manifestations of the seething activity below, rife with interlexical competitions of which the speaker is nearly always totally unaware.

  How Many Contributing Phrases?

  Some observers of the phenomenon of lexical blending have asserted that every blend is necessarily a splicing of exactly two contributing lexical items, but as we briefly said earlier, this is an untenable hypothesis. In any large corpus of blends, there will inevitably be cases where three (and at times even four or more) items were involved.

  As a matter of fact, in the blend made by our delightfully dizzy dean there is a third stock phrase in English that was most likely involved. That phrase is “We’ll pull no punches”, which, just like “We’ll pull out all the stops” and “We’ll leave no stone unturned”, means that one will tackle the challenge not half-heartedly but with as much ardor as one can muster. Moreover, “We’ll pull no punches” and “We’ll pull no stops unturned” start out with exactly the same three words, so that “We’ll pull no punches” seems quite likely to have played a role in the process, although on the other hand it’s far more common to say “We won’t pull any punches”, so there is room for doubt.

  We turn our attention now to some more blatant cases of triple or even higher-degree blends. In a radio interview, an author was describing San Francisco’s famous City Lights Bookstore during the beatnik era. He said:

  Destitute poets were always browsing its well-stocked shelves, and on occasion someone would walk out with a volume tucked under their arm. The clerk would just turn the other eye.

  That last phrase glides by remarkably smoothly; no one would have any trouble understanding it. The interviewer didn’t snicker and say, “Turn the other eye, eh?” But no matter how smooth it sounds, “turn the other eye” is not an English idiom; in fact it makes no sense at all. There are, however, several English idioms that are, in various senses, close to it. One is “look the other way”, another is “turn a blind eye”, and a third is “turn the other cheek”. There is also the shorter idiom “turn away”. We won’t speculate as to how these four idioms might have contributed to the utterance, nor will we claim that we are sure that exactly these four lexical items and no others contributed.

  Indeed, one of the problems with the retrospective analysis of lexical blends (and until there are incredibly sophisticated real-time brain-scanning mechanisms, and until we understand the brain infinitely better, there can only be retrospective analyses based on plausible guesses) is that although sometimes it seems obvious what the contributing phrases had to be, at other times it is highly debatable. We error-makers do not have privileged access to our unconscious mechanisms (they are “under the scenes”!), and we are not necessarily more reliable analysts of our own utterances than outsiders are, so the phrases that we ourselves suggest as being the “culprits” are not necessarily the right ones. In any case, it would be naïve to think that all contributing phrases contribute to an equal degree. So what we are faced with is, first, a list of plausible contributing phrases, which could include many more than two, and then the thorny (in fact, unanswerable) question as to how much each phrase contributed to the final blend (not in the sense of how many words it contributed, but in the sense of how much influence it wielded).

  Here is a lexical blend with an unclear number of ingredients:

  What is it the hell he wants, anyway?

  Two contributing phrases are clearly “What is it that he wants?” and “What the hell does he want?” But there is also a potential third contributor — “What in the hell does he want?” — and even possibly a fourth — “What in hell does he want?” Although we contend that there is (or at least there was, at the time of the utterance) an actual, scientific fact of the matter as to which of these phrases did or did not contribute to this error in the brain of the particular speaker, we acknowledge that such questions are completely unapproachable, given today’s level of understanding of the human brain.

  Here’s a striking case of multiple influences:

  My dad really hit the stack when I got home so late.

  What the speaker meant is that her father grew very angry very fast, which is to say, he both hit the ceiling and blew his stack. Any native speaker of American English will immediately realize that these two expressions were involved behind the scenes, and perhaps will think that that is the whole story. However, that’s very unlikely. Each of these phrases contains roughly half of the final blend, but there is another very common American idiom — namely, “hit the sack” — which as a whole sounds almost identical to the expression that was uttered. Even though the meaning of “hit the sack” — “go to bed” — is utterly unrelated to sudden bursts of anger, it is hard to believe that the “phonetic pull” or “sonic attraction” of that standard phrase played no role in this blend. It was like a huge planet gravitationally pulling the speaker towards it.

  In this lexical blend and in all others, the phrases that contribute are summoned up out of their dormant state either because of some kind of conceptual proximity to an appropriate concept, or because of phonetic proximity to some lexical item (frequently the nascent blend itself). And either kind of proximity means that an unconscious analogy has been made. To crudely summarize this particular unconscious mental process in just a few words, once the erroneous hybrid phrase had been assembled (by splicing together the fruits of two rival semantic analogies), it “sounded right” because of its phonetic similarity to a very familiar phrase (i.e., thanks to a phonetic analogy), hence it became more alluring, and this gave it a big boost towards getting uttered.

  The following amusing phrase escaped from the lips of a distinguished professor of cognitive science as he was paying gracious tribute to an administrative assistant who was stepping down after many years of service:

  She’ll be hard shoes to fill!

  To the perplexed listener who quickly captured it for posterity in his little notebook, this sentence sounded so extremely strange (indeed, on the verge of incomprehensibility for a moment or two) that he was astounded to see that no one in the assembled crowd of cognitive scientists was smiling, chuckling, or writing it down. How could such a weird, garbled phrase go unnoticed by scores of people whose profession is the study of the mysteries of language and cognition? And yet it did.

  The contributing phrases in this case clearly include the two idioms “She’ll be a hard act to follow” and “It’ll be hard to fill her shoes”, but it’s also likely that the simpler phrase “She’ll be hard to replace” played a role here, since, like the blend itself, it uses the words “She’ll be hard”, without the indefinite article “a”.

  We conclude this section by looking at a blend that strikes us as having even a larger number of plausible co
ntributors than the blends we have discussed so far:

  Things are looking glimmer and glimmer these days.

  It’s almost certain that at least two of the adjectives “glummer”, “gloomier”, and “grimmer” were involved in the behind-the-scenes story of this very pessimistic blend. Each of them bears a unique and strong phonetic resemblance to the nonexistent adjective “glimmer”. It’s also possible that one or both of the adjectives “slimmer” and “dimmer” might have played a role. And finally and most intriguingly, there is the standard phrase “a glimmer of hope”, containing the very word “glimmer” that appears inside the blend. Curiously, though, inside “a glimmer of hope”, the word “glimmer” is a noun, whereas inside the blend it is an invented adjective. Although the meaning of “a glimmer of hope” is cautiously optimistic, it’s a phrase that tends to be uttered only when a very worrisome situation is being described, so it’s a close cousin of the overall pessimistic feeling that lay behind the blend.

  We hasten to add that not all six of these plausible contributors were immediately obvious to us. It took us much rumination to come up with them, but once we had done so, every one of them struck us as quite plausible, four of them even being very strong candidates. So here we seem to have six different potential ingredients, and yet it’s impossible to know which of them were actually involved, and how deeply, and in what ways. And of course there could be yet other words or phrases that played a contributing role but that we didn’t think of. All in all, then, the question of what really took place behind the scenes in a particular lexical blend is, as this example shows, fantastically slippery. All we can do is make educated guesses.

  Single-word Lexical Blends

  Most of the blends that we’ve looked at so far involve phrases made up of several words, but blending can also take place on a smaller scale, using exclusively short words. The resulting blends pass by extremely fast, however, which makes them even less likely to be heard. For instance:

  Our book is maistly about analogy-making.

  This oddity, featuring an obvious blend of the two rival adverbs “mainly” and “mostly”, has been heard many times since it was first added to our collection. When seen in print, it stands out like a sore thumb, but in the flow of very rapid speech, it often sails by completely unheard.

  Another simple but subtle one-word blend is the following:

  I don’t want to dwelve into it.

  In this case, the participating phrases were “to dwell on it” and “to delve into it”. Both “dwell” and “delve” are fairly unusual words. Daring to use a word at the fringes of one’s vocabulary is a bit like making a long, risky leap to hit a note near either end of the keyboard; obviously the chances of hitting two neighboring notes at once go up greatly when one lunges at a target that is far from one’s most familiar territory.

  And yet sometimes very high-frequency words are blended as well, as the following case shows. The phone rang and Danny’s father picked it up. “Is Danny there?” asked a young voice. The father heard himself reply:

  I’m not sure — I’ll go seck.

  Being an ardent error-collector, he instantly jotted down his own error with glee, at first thinking it was just a cute amalgam of two one-syllable words — namely, “see” and “check”. It occurred to him to wonder why he hadn’t combined them in the reverse fashion (“I’ll go chee”), but then he realized that there was a third component playing a key role behind the scenes — namely, the very common phrase “Just a sec!”, which had certainly been one of his thoughts as he put the phone down, even if he didn’t utter it. If there had been any competition between “I’ll go chee” and “I’ll go seck”, this extra hidden phonetic factor would have easily tipped the balance in favor of “I’ll go seck.”

  Here’s another blend of single words, one that we’ve heard many a time, and once again, it tends to go by so fast and to sound so natural that it’s easy to miss:

  Why, shurtainly!

  A fight between “Sure!” and “Certainly!” is shurtainly what lurks behind the scenes.

  Herewith follows a small pot-pourri of lexical blends at the single-word level:

  Monosyllabic blends: That’s a neece idea! / She’s pretty darmn young for him, if you ask me / A couple of unwarranted assumptions have slept into the text / Will you please stut that out? / I decided to skwitch to a later chapter / We’ll board as soon as the plight has unloaded / He’s a big wheeze in the NSF / I’ll come over pretty shoon / He vanished into the maws of the volcano / She’s scared of little beasties that prounce all about…

  Polysyllabic blends: He’s such an easy-go-lucky guy / It’s a pretty tall building, fifteen flories high / An outburst in which she bystepped all logic / She’ll probably arrive somewhere arout ten o’clock / I did it as quiftly as I could / Yeah, I see what you’re griving at / He’s got lots of oddbeat ideas / Wow, you’re quick on the updraw! / I’m going outstairs to get the paper / So far they just have two kildren / She’s out in California, visiting her farents / Thousands of people jammed the square to show their concern for the frailing pope / You’ve just gotta keep on truggin’ / And then he slowly pulled on his slousers / His oversight caused a humendous wave of guilt / They were very viligent about including bike paths in the plan / Don’t be such a slugabout! / She was the spearleader of the project / She’s such a self-centered, inconsisterate person / I agree full-heartedly / That woman who lives across the hall is such a biddy-boddy / You should probably add a short appendum to your article / What in the world motivates that kind of zealousy? / It was a real annoyment / For his birthday they’re preparing a big shing-ding / He was bored to death by all that grudgery / With a catchy title like that for your talk, you’re bound to get a good showout / Her sense of humor could do with some retunement / Of the two parents, I’m the pushycat / Why does the phone always ring at some un-god-awful hour?

  Blurting out the Exact Opposite of What One Means

  Lexical blending sometimes results in one’s saying the exact opposite of the idea that one intends to convey. For instance, when the fan belt in a certain woman’s brand-new car suddenly snapped, she frustratedly commented, “I don’t think those things just break for no reason at all!” Her husband, who concurred and wanted to lend her moral support, replied:

  I don’t agree!

  inadvertently blending “I agree” and “I don’t think so either”, so that his remark came out 180 degrees opposite to his intention.

  A professor had been invited to submit an article to an anthology and was glad to accept but he had no time to write anything new. Luckily, he remembered a piece he had written some years earlier but never published. However, on rereading his old piece, he saw that it was not very much on the topic, so he reluctantly had to abandon that avenue. Then a colleague suggested to him that he use a different unpublished manuscript, and he was very enthusiastic about that idea. But when he looked up this second old manuscript, he discovered, to his shock, that it, too, was very far from the topic — in fact, considerably more so than the article he’d already given up on. In frustration, he commented, strongly stressing the two words in italics:

  Unfortunately, this article’s even less irrelevant than the first one was!

  Unwittingly, he had combined “even more irrelevant” with “even less relevant” and in so doing he came out with a statement diametrically opposed to what he was thinking.

  Biplans

  A certain kind of blend involves two (or more) different thoughts that occur to the speaker at the same time. We will refer to such a blend as a “biplan”, since it seems to blend two different plans for the utterance. A biplan is different from the lexical blends described in earlier sections in that the analogical link between the two rival items is more abstract, and for that reason the blended ideas seem further apart.

  A typical example of this phenomenon took place when Francisco exclaimed:

  It sure is thirsty!

  He was simultaneously thin
king the thought “It sure is hot!” and also the thought “I sure am thirsty!”, and he telescoped the two thoughts into one short sentence, which, though compact, made no sense. Being hot and being thirsty are two quite distinct physical discomforts, and it’s hot situations and I’m thirsty situations have less overlap than do most of the blended situations that we’ve covered in the past few pages.

  Nonetheless, both types of situation involve a core essence of physical discomfort wanting to be remedied, and it was to an analogy residing at this rather high level of abstraction that Francisco’s blend was due.

  Among the biplans in our collection are the following ones:

  I like these ones nicer than those / I hope that she gets a hold of him today, but I wouldn’t cross your fingers / She’s finishing the touches on her new cookbook / When I heard the news, I couldn’t help not to think of you / It all depends to what you do now! / Sorry, but I just can’t make it won’t work out / I thought I looked everywhere, but I hadn’t occurred to me to look in the drawer / Be carefully if you’re driving in this weather / Get well better! / Where in the dickens did I do with that stupid knife? / I’m gonna ’bout to take my shower / Oh, sorry — I completely remembered that I’d promised to send it to you! / There’s really no need to thank me; it was my problem! / Boy, that package weighs a lot of money!

  In several of these it’s apparent that there are rival grammatical plans that are duking it out behind the scenes. In the final one, the two rival plans involve a competition between the thoughts “it weighs a lot” and “it’s worth a lot of money”.