Surfaces and Essences

  Here is a biplan that took place in Italian but that is simple to understand whatever one’s native language is. Alberto was speaking on the phone with a friend, and the conversation was winding down. Trying to finish up in a courteous fashion, he said:

  Grao!

  When he heard this nonsense word come out of his mouth, he was quite embarrassed by it. It was the awkward result of an attempt to say “grazie” (“thanks”) and “ciao” at the same time, so he rapidly tried to save face by trying once more, intending to say just one of them. Unfortunately, though, he hadn’t quite made up his mind which of the two rival thoughts he really wanted to express, and so the second time what came out of his mouth was again wrong, though somewhat less wrong. It was this:

  Giao!

  which was nearly “ciao” except that the initial consonant sounded like an English “j” instead of English’s “ch” sound. What had happened was that a tiny residue of the initial voiced consonant cluster “gr” of “grazie” remained inside the new word’s initial consonant, altering the intended unvoiced “ch” sound by voicing it. This is a good example of how two components in a blend can contribute to it to different degrees, “ciao” clearly having had the upper hand, but “grazie” not letting itself be shut out entirely. Here again we see a blend brought about through an abstract analogy — namely, the analogy between grazie situations and ciao situations, which are both centered on the speaker’s intention to conclude a conversation politely.

  Our final example of a biplan is taken not from speech but from an email message that one of us received from a friend:

  I hope my package got there in one shape.

  Here the contributing phrases, based on common idioms, involved distinct though related thoughts: “got there in one piece” and “got there in good shape”. The resulting blend is rather humorous.

  As this example and many others show, there is no hard-and-fast line between blends that involve genuinely distinct thoughts (i.e., biplans), and blends that involve very closely related or synonymous thoughts (i.e., more standard lexical blends). It’s a matter of degree and thus a subjective judgment call, but to our minds it’s a useful distinction, although of course, as is true for any category, its edges are far from sharp.

  Conceptual-proximity Slippage Errors

  Autumn had arrived, and Sandra, looking out at a yard completely covered with fallen leaves, commented:

  We’ve got to peel the lawn.

  What she meant was: “We’ve got to rake the lawn.”

  Sandra used a word that is typically used in connection with potatoes, cucumbers, apples, or other vegetables or fruits, as if the lawn had acquired a skin that some appropriate mechanical device could just strip off. Had she been writing a poem about the advent of autumn, her word choice might be considered a novel metaphor for getting rid of the leaves; it would have seemed creative and insightful. But this was simply an everyday utterance, and as such it is reminiscent of the children’s sentences featuring surprising verb choices, such as “undress the banana”, “eat some water”, “nurse the truck”, and others, which we discussed in Chapter 1.

  There is, however, a noteworthy difference between this case and those. The children had not yet acquired the fine-grained semantic mesh that would have allowed them to find the appropriate verbs. They simply lacked the crucial concepts and the associated lexical items, and so their utterances were cases of people doing an optimal job, given the limited set of concepts at their disposal; Sandra, by contrast, simply retrieved the wrong concept, given the much broader conceptual repertoire that she possessed (and she did not retrieve and apply the concept deliberately, as a poet might).

  What mechanisms could lie behind this anomalous choice of concept and of word? The same ones, essentially, as are responsible for phrase blends, as discussed above. In the case of those blends, though, the battles were never won outright by a single word or phrase; instead, two, three, or more winners split the spoils in the utterance that was produced. The difference between those cases and Sandra’s “peel the lawn” comment is that in Sandra’s case, the battle was won outright, but it was won by an impostor. This can be compared to a pianist who, under intense real-time pressures, aims at a broad region of the keyboard and who, rather than hitting two keys at once, hits just one, as intended, but unfortunately it is a clunker rather than the right note.

  To describe such an event, we can say that a quite broad zone of a person’s conceptual space was activated, containing a number of concepts with distinct lexical labels, and one of the less appropriate concepts in that zone somehow wound up winning the battle for utterance. In the case of Sandra’s utterance, in the broad swath of conceptual space that was activated in her brain by the sight of the leaf-strewn lawn, aside from the concept to peel there was almost certainly a set of closely clustered concepts, some of which would seem fairly close to the activity of gardening, such as the concept to rake, and very likely a set of other concepts, including to sweep. Indeed, had she said “We’ve got to sweep the lawn”, it would still have sounded like an error (or a mildly creative metaphor), but it would have sounded less wrong (or less creative), since to sweep is clearly much closer to the concept of to rake than is to peel.

  Any slip of this sort reveals a potential analogy that is stored in a particular speaker’s brain by virtue of the conceptual proximity of two concepts. Given that each concept in our mind is surrounded by a “semantic halo” consisting of other concepts that are semantically close to it, this means that in everyone’s brain there are millions of such latent analogies, ready and waiting to reveal themselves through conceptual-proximity slips, though of course most of them will, alas, never be granted the chance to show their eager faces, since such slips, although fairly frequent, are not frequent enough to reveal the entire semantic halo surrounding each particular concept.

  We’ll begin our brief tour of such errors with a few examples in which a broad zone in conceptual space seems to have been activated and one of the concepts inside it got chosen more or less randomly, reminiscent of a pianist whose hand rises so high above the keyboard that when it comes down, it doesn’t land on the right note but on a random note in its general vicinity.

  At a dinner party, a guest remarked that he had recently seen “a marvelous Finnish movie about a woman transporting a turkey across the United States in an airplane”. His wife gently corrected him, saying that it in fact it was an Icelandic movie about a woman transporting a goose.

  For non-Scandinavians, it would be relatively easy to mix up any two Scandinavian countries, and it also seems extremely plausible for a person to confuse two varieties of large fowl standardly consumed on festive occasions. But it would have been very unlikely for the guest to have described the film as, for example, “a Peruvian movie about a woman transporting a hummingbird” or “a Vietnamese movie about a woman transporting an ostrich”. Such slippages strikes us as highly implausible because we intuit that the interconceptual distances in anyone’s mind are much greater, making the analogies much more improbable.

  L. was cleaning out her closet of some childhood toys. Picking up a stuffed whale, she said, “I’m going to toss out this little lion”, and then felt embarrassed.

  Both whales and lions play “regal” roles in their respective habitats, which explains why they would lie fairly close to each other in L.’s memory, and which also explains why it would have been unlikely for L. to refer to the toy she was holding in her hand as “this little mosquito”, “this little snail”, “this little zebra”, or “this little octopus”.

  A woman was explaining to a friend why he hadn’t been notified of her party. “I put a bunch of PS’s in my email, and I thought I’d included you.”

  The woman didn’t mean “PS’s” but “cc’s”. She simply confused one common two-letter abbreviation having to do with mail (and email) with another such item.

  Something in the kitchen smelled nice, and when A. went in, he found his daughter
fixing a cake. But something troubled him, and he said, “Move your cookbook further from the sink!” When she looked at him strangely, he repeated what he had said. She again looked at him with confusion and said, “But that’s not the sink!” He tried to patch up what he’d said, but what came out was, “Your book should be far away from the kitchen!” It took him a few more seconds before he could articulate what he meant, namely “Your book should be far away from the stove!”

  What we see in this example is that the distance in conceptual space in A.’s brain between sink and stove — and also between kitchen and stove, for that matter — was smaller than one might suspect. Or to be more precise, it was relatively small under the specific constellation of cognitive pressures created by that moment and that context.

  K. said, “I saw a beautiful bird in my yard but I couldn’t identify it, so I called up a bird-watching friend and gave her as clear an explanation as I could.” Then K., hearing her own error, said, “Uh, I mean ‘description’.”

  The concepts of explanation and description are far less tangible than such concepts as peel, goose, lion, PS, and stove, but intangibility does not reduce the likelihood of an interconceptual slippage taking place as a result of semantic proximity.

  P. was talking about various ingredients one could put into a vegetable soup, and he wound up by saying, “And of course pasta is temporary — or rather, it’s optional.”

  This example, centered on a semantic slippage between adjectives instead of nouns, serves to remind us that what goes for nouns goes for other parts of speech, and for longer phrases as well.

  Professor H. said, “I have a wonderfully free position at my university: instead of having to teach standard courses, I get to dream up egocentric seminars on all sorts of topics.”

  Was this a Freudian slip, revealing the deep dark secret of Professor H.’s unbounded egocentricity, or was it a more innocent event? We would opt for the latter, suggesting that it was merely a vanilla conceptual-proximity slippage error, in which the long adjective “idiosyncratic” was replaced by the slightly shorter adjective “egocentric”. Both adjectives have meanings that could be expressed approximately as “determined by my own personal desires”, with “egocentric” leaning more towards the idea of “doing exactly what I want” and “idiosyncratic” leaning more towards the idea of “indulging my personal quirks”, and so it’s not in the least surprising that both of them would have been simultaneously activated in this particular context. Moreover, the two words are phonetically very similar — in fact, so similar that it’s very likely that exactly this same semantic slippage has been committed hundreds if not thousands of times before, the world around.

  Some semantic slippages seem so weird that one might think that whoever made them must be deranged or must suffer from a highly deprived conceptual and lexical repertoire, and yet the people who made the following strangely childlike errors were all perfectly normal adults.

  W. and his wife were watching a DVD on television at home. The opening scene was so dark that it was hard to make anything out, so W. got up and walked over to the window, saying, “I’m going to turn off the shutters.”

  L. asked, “When do the stores finish this evening?”

  When F. was asked, “How old is your house?”, he replied, “When we were considering buying it, we were told that it was born in the late 1930s.”

  The above examples are reminiscent of the utterances “They turned off the rain” and “Turn your eyes on, Mommy”, which were made by children and were cited in Chapter 1, but since the people who came out with the above oddities were all adults and were thus at a far more advanced stage of cognitive development than young children, their utterances have to be considered errors. Such slippages show that despite the refinement of a mature and sophisticated person’s conceptual repertoire, semantic connections that were forged during their childhood remain latently present for the entirety of their life.

  A. woke up extremely groggy and said to her husband, “Too much sunlight — could you please pull the eyelids shut?” In fact, she meant “the curtains”.

  When one is in such a woozy state, one can blurt out very peculiar things. This particular slip reveals a potential analogy in A.’s brain, by virtue of conceptual proximity, between the concepts of curtain and eyelid. This seems rather odd, but how else can one account for her strange remark?

  S. worked in a large company and had misplaced a document. “Just a second — let me go check in my bedroom”, she commented (instead of saying “in my office”), thus unwittingly revealing a certain degree of mental confusion between her personal and professional life.

  Many conceptual-proximity errors are characterized by involuntary slippages along the dimension of time, showing that a category such as yesterday may extend much further out, by means of unconscious analogy-making, than one would a priori expect. The following examples illustrate this kind of slippage:

  A very common error — one made by virtually every teacher from time to time — is to start a class by saying, “Yesterday we were talking about…” usually meaning two days earlier, but sometimes a week earlier. A variation on this theme took place when a teacher opened class after two weeks of vacation by saying, “Last week, we were talking about.”

  Once again in this same general ballpark, a colleague was discussing the courses he had taught during the previous semester, and he came out with “The courses I’ve so far taught today” when he in fact meant “this year”, thus revealing a latent analogy stored in his brain between short-term and long-term varieties of now-ness.

  A mother was explaining that her son would soon return in a couple of days from Chicago and said, “He won’t get a lot of sleep, since his grandparents will be picking him up bright and early on Saturday, and he only gets back from Chicago very late yesterday.” Of course she didn’t mean “yesterday” but “the previous day”.

  This mother had intensely projected herself into her son’s point of view, imagining how he himself would feel when his alarm clock went off on Saturday morning, and she described Friday night from that vantage point, as having already gone by, rather than from her actual vantage point, in which Friday night was still a couple of days in the future. In other words, for this mother, the intensity of identification with her son briefly reduced the semantic distance between the concepts of the previous day and yesterday so much that the one was able to slip into the other.

  While all the previous slippage errors were based on simple and obvious analogies, the errors in the next set are based on subtler analogies, which involve some intangible function (the abstract action performed by an entity, the abstract role played by a person, and so forth).

  He and she were discussing an event due to occur on October 20 and she wanted to know what day of the week that would be. He impatiently said, “Go look at the map!”

  What he meant was “Look at the calendar!” The slip is easily explained, a calendar being an evident temporal analogue of a spatial map, but nonetheless, in this context, no one would intentionally say “map” instead of “calendar”.

  A student was relating the story of the tragically early death (at age 20) of the great French mathematician Évariste Galois, and he said, “And so, the night before the fateful debate, Galois stayed up all night and in a frenzy wrote down all his ideas…”

  The student knew very well that Galois had died as a result of a duel, not a debate, but the concepts debate and duel were semantically close to begin with in his mind (as they are in ours as well). Also, the presidential campaign was in full swing at the time (not “in high swing”, as we originally wrote here!), and televised debates had just taken place, making it much more likely for these particular wires to be crossed.

  The debate/duel analogy is just one of myriads of potential analogies that are hidden in each human mind but whose existence one wouldn’t suspect a priori. The student’s error, however, reveals that this analogy was indeed lurking in his mind and simply
needed the right opportunity to show its face. The intensely political atmosphere of the period primed the concept of debate, which had the consequence of reducing its distance from the concept of duel. Moreover, the likelihood of such a slippage was enhanced by the (essentially irrelevant) fact that the image of writing one’s ideas down on paper is much more easily connected with the concept of debate than with that of duel.

  D. wanted to make a comment about the fall on skis taken by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the first word that came out of his mouth was “George”, from “George Bush”.

  What could have led to D.’s confusion between these two people? In the first place, both were very salient right-wing politicians of roughly the same age — but there was more than just that linking them in D.’s mind. Whereas Governor Schwarzenegger had recently broken his leg in a tumble taken while he was standing stock still on a ski slope, President Bush had famously nearly choked to death one time while eating a pretzel. The analogy linking these two mishaps of celebrity politicians is subtle. The shared conceptual skeleton involves a serious threat to a person’s physical well-being that comes about unexpectedly during a seemingly trivial and innocuous activity. It’s hard to imagine that there would be an a priori link in anyone’s brain between the ideas of eating a pretzel and standing on a ski slope, or between the ideas of breaking a leg and choking on something in one’s throat. On the other hand, the abstract idea that no matter how famous one is, one can get hurt in a trivial-seeming accident may well have been a key part of D.’s unconscious encoding of each of the two mishaps, and if so, that common element would have catalyzed his retrieval of the first name “George” in this context.

  A science writer who had just published a biography of the physicist and Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer was having tea with a friend, and she stated that Frank Oppenheimer and his more famous brother Robert had both been infatuated with communism in the 1930’s but had rejected it after a short while, and in that connection, she casually added that in those early days of the Soviet Union, Benjamin Franklin, too, had traveled there but he had come back very disillusioned with it. “Benjamin Franklin?” exclaimed the friend, amused. For her part, the science writer was shocked that she had come out with that clearly wrong name, and yet she couldn’t recall who she had in fact meant. A few days later she finally did recall who it was — Thomas Edison.