by Kim Pederson…….

Is it just a slip of the tongue? I sometimes wonder what goes on in our brains when we write or speak a word that’s different from the one we intended to write or speak. Case in point. Yesterday, while blogging about “The Unconfusion of Tongues,” I intended to type “Tower of Babel” and instead typed “Towel of Babel.” I must have read through the entry three or four times before I noticed the mistake. But was it, I now ask, an error? What might my subconscious have been trying to tell me at that moment? Too bad the veritable namesake of this kind of slip, Sigmund Freud, is not around to consult. If he were, though, he might say something like “Stop with the babbling already. Sometimes a towel is just a towel.”

At least I’m not alone in my unintentionally slippording [slipping in one word for another] on occasion. Psychology Today tells us that “slips of the tongue are almost inevitable.” For every 1,000 words spoken, it reports, we make one or two errors. At an estimated talking speed of 150 words per minute, a slippord occurs about once every seven minutes, which means we make between seven and twenty-two verberrors [verbal errors] each day. (For Scandinavians, especially Norwegians, this total is much less because, as everyone knows, we have a genetic speech governor that restricts us to uttering 10 words or fewer in a 24-hour period.)

PT goes on to explain that the psychoanalytical take on misspeaking is a bit more provocative: “The Freudian slip is invoked to explain some strange and embarrassing behavior. ‘Nice to beat you,’ smiles a woman when she meets the ex-girlfriend of her husband.” Freud would likely have insisted, we are told, that some repressed thought or motive is behind such flubs.

More recent science, apparently, would also tell us that our sometimes embarrassing miscues are “all in our heads,” but rather than bubbling up out of the subconscious, they result from our semantic, lexical, and phonological networks getting their wires crossed. Whenever we want to say something, our semantic network must search the 30,000 words or so in our vocabularies, choose the right one, and pass it on to the phonological network. That one must activate the correct sounds needed to enunciate the word. At the same time, our lexical network must place the word about to be spoken in an order with other words such that it comes out in a grammatically correct and so comprehensible. When these “activations” get mixed up or out of order we say things like “homely cousewife” or “time wounds all heels.”

Many other factors intrude on our good speech intentions as well. In the end, however, PT counsels us that “most bananas are just bananas,” that is, no hidden meanings. Worrying about slips doesn’t help prevent them. The trick is to just ignore them and keep going with whatever you were saying. If you need a role model for this, you need go no further than George W. Bush, who suffered not a whit from saying things like “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream” and “I’d like to spank all teachers.” I’m not sure, however, that George was misspeaking in all of these instances. After all, when he pronounced “they misunderestimated me,” he couldn’t have been more right.

* Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking cigar. By Max Halberstadt. Public Domain.