Oops! How’s That Again?

-Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940-)

In this essay Rosenblatt enriches his discussion with remarkable examples. The tone of this essay is humorous, but it deals with a serious issue, i. e. psychological causes of bloopers.

Slips of the tongue occur all the time. Not all such fluffs are so easy to take, however. These verbal errors can have a very bad effect on both who hears them and who makes them. Almost all the great people of the world make such gaffes or faux pas. The word faux pas was originated in the seventeenth century. At that time, it was used to refer to a woman’s lapse from virtue.

Mistranslation also causes a lot of verbal errors. Such mistakes which are of low level are called bloopers. Another type of errors is called spoonerism in which the transposition of initial or other sounds of words occurs. William Archibald Spooner, the principal of New College, Oxford, used to do many such mistakes in the early 1900s. Once he chided a student saying: “You have hissed all my mystery lectures………” instead of “You have missed all my history lectures…”

When we find such errors funny, psychologists and linguists take them seriously. Victoria Fromkin of the linguistic department at U.C.L.A. thinks that slips of the tongue are the clues to how the brain stores and articulates language. According to her, thought is placed by the brain into a grammatical framework before it is expressed.

According to psychologists, verbal errors are related to mental process. Freud, for the first time, described that the errors do not take place accidentally. They express the speaker’s inner desire. Moreover, psychoanalyst Ludwig Eidelberg suggests that a slip of the tongue involves the entire network of id, ego and superego. He gives an example of a young man who entered a restaurant with his girlfriend and ordered a room instead of a table.

We find the mistakes funny because they break our monotonies. Slips of the tongue, therefore, are like slips on banana peels. But laughing at others’ mistakes is an act of meanness.

The most interesting laugh is produced by strange mistakes which show us a new world of logic and possibility. Lewis Carroll evoked sublime laugh by creating a new and foolish idea with the help of verbal errors.

Most of the human efforts are unsuccessful. Even the best planned actions fail. Nothing is as successful as dream. So, we laugh at each other’s mistakes.