Alex Gross - Linguistics Blog "Slips of the Tounge: Windows to the Mind"

Alex Gross
Mr. Roddy
IHSS
11 September 2019
Linguistics Blog “Slips of the Tongue: Windows to the Mind”
Slips of the Tongue, also known as Freudian Slips, are things that happen to people all over the world. It isn’t something that just happens because you are uneducated on what you are talking about, or grammar in general, but there are some people who are more prone to these than others. For example during Ronald Regan’s life time, he made two of these comments that have become very well known. The first was “A tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at.” The other very well known one was a misquote from John Adams’ “Facts are stubborn things”, In which Regan said “Facts are stupid things.” There are many different ways that these can happen, and I have narrowed them down into five general types, which I have listed in order of how commonly they occur. The first is grammatical errors. These usually occur with typing or writing something down, but it can also be noticed when someone mispronounces something. The second is when someone has something else on their mind, and says it. This could be thinking about a past President, and referring to them as the current one because they are in a different state of mind. Surprisingly this happens quite often amongst politicians. The third is falsely quoting someone. This is one of the worst ways to slip up, because it can be an offensive statement, and additionally, people might get offended and say it is disrespectful to the author of that quote. The fourth, somewhat uncommon type of slip of the tongue, is when you say something politically incorrect. This may happen as a non-accidental situations, even if you regret it, but sometimes this literally happens on accident, and is very dangerous because of the amount of people it can offend. The final type is relating to something called the mental dictionary, which I will get into in a minute. This is not very common, but is almost always seen as a very innocent mistake. The reason I chose this article is actually because I was thinking about this very subject a few days ago. I was surprised about the fact that people slip up so often, and started wondering why we mix up words that are in some cases similar, but out of the correct context. What I mean by this is something that I will get into while explaining the mental dictionary. An example of a mistake with the mental dictionary, would be saying “What race is that horse?” when you mean to say “What color is that horse?” Some people would commonly associate race and color, but when you are using the word race in relation to horses, it has a COMPLETELY different meaning. The mental dictionary is the thing that keeps all of these words that we associate together, and we make errors because some words that are usually interchangeable, can have many different meanings, and not fit in a certain context, even though in some contexts they are synonyms. There is documentation of these mistakes happening since as early as 700-799 A.D. There was a book written by an Arab linguist around this time, that studied these Freudian Slips. It was more recently discovered that it also went into the deeper meaning about how these mistakes could shape future languages, because of the fact that language is always changing. I decided to do some additional outside research because I was very interested in the fact that these slips that still occurred very far in the past, could shape language as we know it today. Upon further investigation, I found out that this was very true. An example of this is the word “ammunition”. It dates back to the french “la munition” which has the same meaning as ammunition in English. It is thought that a single person misheard it centuries ago, and passed it on as l’ammunition, which is translated to “the ammunition”. This simple mistake and the language barrier shaped a word that we use often today, and it all dates back to a single person making one slip of the tongue. I think the entire point of this article is not to shame people for mistakes they made or make people be more careful with slipping up and having a brain blank, but instead to make people aware that these things happen, because it shapes our primary mode of communication that we use thousands of times every day ; linguistics.

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