They occur on average once every 10 words, by some accounts. So if people say an average of 15,000 words each day, that’s about 1,500 verbal blunders a day.
When the man in my life decided this weekend to bring the builders a tray laden with mugs of coffee, they were delighted. They downed tools, walked out into the Indian summer sunshine, sat down on a low wall and imbibed.
Boy, were they sorry they’d imbibed. Their faces puckered like prunes. They gagged. They sniffed the mugs disbelievingly. Each looked to see were they the only one he’d done it to. No — he’d done it to all of them. They pondered the option of following him and beating him senseless. Then they shrugged and went back to work, leaving the mugs on the wall, still full of steaming liquid.
He’d taken their orders carefully. One had wanted black coffee, the other two preferred white coffee with varying amounts of sugar. He’d delivered punctiliously. The only problem was that he’d used Bisto. According to the carpenter, a piping cup of milky Bisto with three spoons of sugar briskly stirred into it is a life-changing experience.
It’s the sort of error you make when you’re thinking about something else. More specifically, it’s the sort of error a man makes when he’s going through the grieving process a bad rugby result requires.
The verbal equivalent is the Taoiseach’s “upsetting the apple tart”. Just as a jar of Bisto looks like a jar of Nescafe when your mind is elsewhere, “tart” and “cart” become equally relevant to the tongue when the brain is occupied with something else at the time.
A linguist from Texas named Michael Erard has just published a fascinating book about spoken communication, entitled Um, with the subtitle, Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean.
“Our ordinary speech is notoriously fragmented,” writes Erard, “and all sorts of verbal blunders swim through our sentences like bubbles in champagne. They occur on average once every 10 words, by some accounts. So if people say an average of 15,000 words each day, that’s about 1,500 verbal blunders a day.”
Children’s mistakes as they come to terms with language tend to be cherished by their families. Seamus Heaney remembers how, a few days after his daughter went to school for the first time, she came home and told Marie, his wife, that several children in the class had cried for their mothers.
“I didn’t,” the little girl reported with some pride. “But my heart thinked it.”
If an Oscar were awarded for verbal fumbles, the lifetime achievement award would have to go to Dr William Archibald Spooner, an academic who lectured at Oxford in the 19th century. Dr Spooner became so famous for his capacity to scramble the English language that, when he spoke at a conference in South Africa, he sadly wrote to his wife that, while the local papers had covered his visit, “of course they thought me most famous for my Spoonerisms, so I was not greatly puffed up”.
A “Spoonerism” happens when the sounds from two words get transposed. So once when Dr Spooner was toasting Queen Victoria at a ceremonial dinner, he asked those present to “give three cheers for our queer old dean”, and described a group of farmers as “noble tons of soil”. Indicating why he preferred the ambience of his own university, he commented that Cambridge, in winter, was “a bloody meek place”. In an observation with which IBEC might agree, he stated that “the weight of rages will press harder and harder upon the employer”.
Students crowding into Dr Spooner’s lectures in the hope of capturing one of his verbal gaffes were, for the most part, disappointed. They didn’t happen that often, and he couldn’t produce them to order, even if he had wanted to, which he clearly did not. Arguably his best and most sustained Spoonerism happened when he became infuriated with an undergraduate arsonist.
“You were seen fighting a liar in the quadrangle,” he told the fire-setter. “In addition, you have hissed all of my mystery lectures. In fact, you have tasted two whole worms and you must leave Oxford this afternoon by the next town drain.”
It’s difficult to apply Freud’s theories about verbal blunders to Dr Spooner’s variety since most of them were so clearly caused only by switched consonants, rather than by anything more sinister.
Freud saw spoken error as the equivalent of fissures on the side of a volcano allowing the venting of pressured material. Erard says that Freud’s book, The Psychopathology of Daily Life, published in 1901, “turned the marginalia of people’s lives, including their speech errors, into spotlights on the unconscious self”. As Freud saw it, any mistake in speech, even if it looked harmless on the surface, hid a secret — and probably sexual — intention, of which the speaker was consciously unaware. The smallest glitch in communication was interpreted by him as a clue demanding forensic interrogation and analysis.
Freud would have had a field day with George Bush, particularly with the latter’s statement celebrating what he saw as the growth of democracy within Iraq.
“Who could have possibly envisioned an erecti— an election in Iraq at this point in history?” asked the president.
Freud would have seen that infelicity as indicative of subconscious sexual desires on the part of Dubya. In truth, it’s much more likely that simply juxtaposing “election” with “Iraq” confused the president’s tongue, rather than opening a window on his subconscious. A bit like when the famous talkshow host Merv Griffin, who died a few weeks ago, stumbled when introducing a guest.
“We sure thank you for taking time out from your busy sexual... I mean, schedule.”
The fact is that we don’t notice half the verbal mistakes we make or anybody else makes, because they’re simply not interesting or entertaining enough to earn a place in our memory cells. It’s only when the substituted word is wildly inappropriate or carries a sexual connotation that we register, remember and recount a spoken error.
Almost every nervous bridegroom, for example, will have heard the story of the groom who wanted to mention in his wedding speech the generosity of his new mother-in-law, who’d catered to his caffeine addiction by giving him a state-of-the-art coffee percolator, but who ended up thanking the mother of the bride “for giving me this perky copulator”.
In a similar vein, even the innocent spoken errors of politicians are remembered because they tend to be made at public — sometimes too public — gatherings. This is further complicated by ever-present recording technology, which ensures that every mistake gets replayed ad infinitum.
It’s tough. But it comes with the political territory. They have to live with it.
It helps if, in the well-intended but slightly mismatched words of Dr Spooner, they have “the courage to blow the bears of life”.
