This confusion was due in part to the fact that in the science writer’s mind, both Edison and Franklin were strongly associated with electricity, but there is far more to the explanation than that. Firstly, both individuals were saliently American (otherwise, why not Ampère, Maxwell, Faraday, or many other famous scientists?). Furthermore, both were self-taught inventors, and both are commonly associated with folksy wisdom (think of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and all the sayings associated with him, and Edison’s famous quotes, such as “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”).
Though we cannot be sure which of these factors played a role, let alone how large a role, we see that there are a number of analogies linking Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison, any of which could have given rise to this slippage. And there are further factors that could have tipped the balance in favor of the name of Benjamin Franklin. For instance, it might have been relevant that his last name coincides with the first name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a contemporary of the Oppenheimer brothers and a figure indelibly associated with the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during that period.
A woman was talking about her nephew, who at age 38 had finally gotten married, and she said, “His mother’s thrilled. Now that Peter’s pregnant, she’s hoping to be a grandmother any day now.”
But no one was pregnant — surely not her nephew, but not his bride either. The aunt merely meant “now that Peter’s married”. However, since the conceptual distance between married and pregnant is fairly small, and in this highly emotional context even more so, it was very easy for her to slip from one to the other. Of course it wasn’t the aunt herself who was ardently dreaming of having a grandchild, but she had projected herself very effectively into the mentality of her sister.
Among the most curious of conceptual-proximity substitution errors are ones based on slippages between a concept and its opposite concept. Here are a few examples:
P. has noticed that on countless occasions over the years he has used the verb “to read” when he meant “to write”, and vice versa. He has also observed that many of his friends have the same tendency, and moreover, he has seen that this is a reliable tendency across languages. Moreover, when speaking French, P. has often caught himself on the verge of blurting out the word “mort” (“dead” or “died”) when meaning to say “né” (“born”), stopping a hair short of making this most embarrassing slip-up.
David and his aging father Jim were driving by a cemetery. Jim commented, “This is where all four of your grandkids were born.” David, who had a daughter of five but no grandchildren, was bewildered by this absurd-sounding remark. But after a moment’s thought he realized that there was a great deal of sense to it — indeed, it was completely true — if he simply replaced two key concepts by their opposite concepts: “This is where all four of your grandparents are buried.”
Jim’s remark was in a certain sense more incorrect than if he had said either “This is where all four of your grandparents were born” or “This is where all four of your grandchildren are buried”, since those sentences contain only one error apiece. And yet, although Jim’s utterance contained two errors, it was much more self-consistent; it is as if one of the two conceptual slippages had brought the other one along on its coattails, as a result of an unconscious desire on Jim’s part to be internally coherent.
Struggling to recall the name of an acquaintance, a woman said, “Unfortunately, my brother’s not home, because I can’t ask him.”
In this error, one frequent conjunction (“so”) was replaced by another one (“because”) having the opposite meaning, thus inverting cause and effect.
To be considered opposites, two concepts must share a great deal. For example, big and small are opposite sizes; likewise, light and dark are opposite degrees of brightness. The fact of inhabiting opposite ends of a spectrum is what makes these pairs of concepts be located very near each other, and it gives rise to the possibility of slippage between them. Ironic though it may seem, oppositeness, which naïvely makes one think of a maximal distance, is actually a type of conceptual nearness; it simply resides at a more abstract level than one usually associates with categories (for example, brightness is more abstract than light and dark). Thus the two extremities of any life are birth and death, and grandchildren and grandparents are both linked to a given person by being two steps away in the sequence of generations, either upwards or downwards. Likewise, reading and writing are both activities connected with printed text, one involving the “decoding” of text and the other carrying out “encoding”; and finally, “because” and “so” both express causality but see it from opposite points of view.
Many conceptual-proximity substitution errors are triggered by situations where a concrete analogy (visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, etc.) and a more abstract one (functional or role-based) reinforce each other, each contributing some pressure towards the slippage, and where the joint pressure due to the simultaneous analogies becomes irresistible. Herewith follow some examples, with the mutually reinforcing analogies spelled out.
A couple emerged from a pizza place with a hot pizza in a cardboard box. The man pointed to the rear of his bike and said, “I’ll take the pizza home in my trunk” (meaning in the basket located above the rear fender of his bike).
The functional analogy here is between parts of a wheeled vehicle that are designed to carry items of any sort. The visual analogy is that both a car’s trunk and this particular bicycle basket were located behind the “driver’s seat”, and moreover this particular basket happened to be a rather large one. Had the basket been located above the front wheel or had it been very small, then a slippage from “in my basket” to “in my trunk” would have been less likely to occur.
W. called the doorknob of the bathroom “the faucet”.
The functional analogy involves a small object that controls or regulates a much larger object. The visual analogy is that both fit comfortably in the palm of one’s hand and both work by twisting. There is also an aspect of priming involved, since it was not a random room’s doorknob that was called “faucet”, but a doorknob in a room that featured faucets aplenty.
Two friends were at the edge of a lake. One of them saw a hang-glider with a very thin white line diagonally descending from it towards a motorboat. Pointing skywards, she exclaimed, “Look at that glider being pulled by a boat!” The other replied, “Oh yes, I can see the string!” Several times more she called it a “string”, until her friend smiled and said, “Don’t you mean ‘wire’? You’re probably thinking of a kite.”
The functional aspect here is that wires and strings are both used to pull things in all sorts of contexts. The visual aspect is that kite strings often go extremely high into the sky and they link high-flying devices to people who are down on the ground, and moreover, kite strings are usually white, just as this tethering line seemed to be. Moreover, a hang-glider seen from far away looks very much like a kite. Even this visual analogy, however, has abstract aspects to it, since the role of the person flying the kite was being played by the boat, the role of the ground was being played by the water, and of course the role of the kite was being played by the hang-glider.
S. referred to the subtitles in a film she was watching as “the footnotes”.
The functional analogy is that both subtitles and footnotes are, generally speaking, short written aids to comprehension, while the visual analogy is clearly that both occur at or near the bottom of the visual field.
A brother and sister were emptying out their late parents’ house of clutter that had accumulated over some fifty-plus years. One of them referred to the basement of the house as “the attic”.
The functional analogy is that both areas of the house had been used for storing the same kinds of old, musty items over a period of decades. The spatial analogy is that both the basement and the attic were very large areas of the house, and both could be accessed only by taking stairs.
A. once complained, “I have a wart on my foot and it hurts when I walk.” He meant “blister”.
The functional analogy is that warts and blisters are unpleasant growths on one’s skin. The visual analogy is that they have roughly the same size and look somewhat alike.
It’s convenient to try to distinguish between perceptual and functional analogies, but the distinction is far from being black-and-white. One of them is based on what is sensorially obvious and the other is based on what is inferred indirectly, even if the inference is so rapid that one doesn’t feel one is drawing any intellectual conclusions at all. For this reason, what is perceptual and what is functional are nearly inseparable. For example, roundness is a visual attribute and rolling is a functional quality, but saying “Round things roll” sounds like a vacuous utterance. We “see” that the back of a chair is intended to brace someone’s torso and that the seat is intended to support their posterior, and these functional qualities seem to be direct perceptions, just as, in our list of semantic slippages, the fact that a car’s trunk is a container seemed a trivially obvious fact, and much the same for the fact that a wire and a string serve as connectors. When the link between perceptual and functional analogies is very strong, then we can speak of strong “affordances”, to use the term devised by the American psychologist James Gibson in the late 1970s to describe the way that an object can implicitly suggest the actions that one can carry out on it.
By contrast, there are cases where it seems clear that the pieces of knowledge activated during perception go beyond what the senses perceive directly. For example, the facts that a dog can protect or can threaten a human being do not directly follow from perception, but the act of perceiving a dog allows these facts to be activated and recalled; thus visual input facilitates access to functional knowledge. The fact that footnotes and subtitles are both pieces of writing aimed at facilitating comprehension, and the fact that blisters and warts are both unpleasant-looking skin growths that one wishes to rid oneself of, are functional pieces of knowledge that any adult has in dormant storage and that can be activated by visual perception. (The same could be said for the relationship between the concepts round and roll, but such a basic connection is so deeply ingrained that it is hard to think of it as having been learned.)
Actions Meet Words
Are the foregoing types of errors limited to the domain of language? Although the term “slip” is generally thought of as referring to speech errors (as in “slip of the tongue”), the same kinds of phenomena show up outside language, in the world of physical actions. Indeed, speech errors are just one manifestation of a broad phenomenon that concerns categories in general, and which reveals itself in various contexts, including physical actions. Action errors, too, have their own eloquent fashion of showing how conceptual wires can get crossed thanks to analogies.
Sometimes we activate appropriate categories but apply them to inappropriate targets. A typical example is when, after pouring ourself a cup of tea with a bit of milk, we pick up the teapot to put it “back” into the refrigerator, when of course our intention was to put the milk back. “The same thing” happens when, after finishing our bath, we reach out and turn on one of the water faucets, when in fact what we intended to do was to open the drain to let the water out. Our intention (to induce some water to flow) was eminently reasonable, but our action brought about a flow in the wrong place and the wrong direction. Or else we can’t find our computer’s charger because earlier, in a moment of distraction, we placed it in the proper pouch but of the wrong container — our backpack’s little pouch instead of our computer bag’s little pouch — thus getting the category pouch correct but missing on the specifics.
C. often placed her cell phone next to her brand-new mouseless computer, and she often reached for it as if it were a mouse. However, it never worked as a mouse, even though it was just about the size of a mouse and was right where a mouse ought to be.
Having pulled into a gas station, D. noticed that the gas pumps were on the wrong side of his car. Instead of making a U-turn or moving across to the parallel set of pumps, D. executed both of these maneuvers, and lo and behold, he found himself with the new set of pumps on the wrong side of his car, exactly as before. This was an action biplan, similar to speech biplans in which a person winds up saying just the opposite of what they intended to say (“My bracelet came unloose”).
One time E. wanted to add a bit of sugar to his coffee and simultaneously to tap his ashes into the ashtray; he wound up pouring sugar into the ashtray while tapping his ashes into his coffee cup, obtaining an undrinkable coffee but a sweetened ashtray.
Then there was the sleepy teen-ager F., who poured his milk right into the cereal box instead of into the bowl that he’d just filled with cereal, and his younger brother G., who, on waking up in the middle of the night, tried to locate his cell phone by shining light around the room from… his cell phone.
As we see, these kinds of action slips are directly comparable to the slips of the tongue discussed above. It makes no difference that some involve words and others do not; the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same. Our next example is a striking case in which words and actions are intimately mixed.
The Error that Boggled the Mind of the Error Connoisseur
It was just about time for the German lesson of Doug’s son Danny, and Christoph, Danny’s tutor as well as a family friend, arrived a bit ahead of time. Father and tutor chatted for a moment in the kitchen, and Doug asked Christoph if he would like something to drink — a Coke, some fruit juice, anything he felt like. Christoph replied, “A glass of water would be perfect, thanks.” But such asceticism didn’t jibe with the Christoph that Doug knew, so to entice his guest he opened the refrigerator and said, “Cranberry juice, apple juice, orange juice, Coke, milk, coffee, tea?” But Christoph simply said, with a gentle smile, “Thanks, but really I’d just like a glass of water.” A bit puzzled but seeing no reason to push any further, Doug turned toward the cupboard where the glasses were, and at the same time he pulled his wallet out of his rear pocket, extracting a one-dollar bill from it. Then, in a friendly fashion, he proferred the bill to Christoph. Only when the latter looked at him in a nonplussed manner did Doug realize that something had gone very much awry. Staring bewilderedly at the piece of paper in his hand, he exclaimed, “What on earth am I doing?”
A moment’s thought, however, shed light on what almost surely lay behind this mysterious act. “Do you know what just happened?” he said to Christoph. “Your request really threw me, in its minimality. Who would go for flavorless water over a delicious drink? And yet I was fully intending to give you your ascetic choice, but at the
same time I was also aware that I owed you $20 for the lesson, so I pulled out my wallet. As I tried to carry out the two unrelated actions simultaneously, my wires got badly crossed. My intention to give you some water got blurred in with my intention to pay you: I unconsciously blended the two goals. Offering you one dollar showed that I’d conflated the simplest possible drink with the simplest possible bill!”
Indeed, lying at the very core of Doug’s action error was an excellent analogy, since the abstract idea of the minimal version of something desirable, originally triggered by Christoph’s insistence on a mere glass of water, had been deftly carried over by Doug from the domain of drinks found in my kitchen to the domain of bills found in my wallet. In a manner reminiscent of the lexical blends that we’ve discussed at considerable length, Doug had changed horses in midstream, nimbly hopping from plainest beverage to plainest bill. This slippage had doubtless been caused by his bafflement at Christoph’s ascetic choice of drink, but the analogy had remained totally unconscious, for otherwise Doug wouldn’t have been perplexed by his own action.
Curiously enough, there is a classic adjective in English that applies perfectly to both sides of the bridge in Doug’s mind — namely, “watered-down”. In a literal sense, a glass of water is (quite obviously) the most water
ed-down drink possible, while in a more abstract sense, the most “watered-down” bill is (also obviously) the one-dollar bill.
Playfully flipping this analogy around, we can imagine the following exchange between Doug and Christoph. “While we’re waiting, can I offer you a little bit of cash? Take a gander at all these lovely bills in my wallet! I’ve got a five, a ten, even a twenty — whatever you like!” “Oh, thanks a lot, but a one-dollar bill will do just fine…” Thereupon, Doug goes to the sink, pours a glass of water, and proffers it to Christoph.
Though Many are Called, Just One is Selected
As we’ve seen, speech errors and other anomalous actions are the visible traces of a ceaseless unconscious competition between categories, under various pressures. Most of the time, just one of the competitors handily wins out, and in such cases, no auditory or written trace is left of the hidden contest. In that sense, listening (especially without a trained ear) to a smooth, fluent-sounding conversation is a bit like browsing through a photo book of the Olympic Games in which only gold-medal winners are ever shown; one would never suspect that behind each winner’s beaming smile, there was a long and arduous series of merciless competitions over a period of years, beginning with local competitions inside each country, then wider ones, until finally the championship event took place. For every winner, there are countless unseen and unsung losers. But there are occasional ties, and such special circumstances are reminders, although only in a small way, that a fierce competition guided the process from start to finish.
Surfaces and Essences Page 48