Are slips of the tongue really random?
Sometimes, I wish they were
Freud is often criticized for having an overdeveloped sense of attribution: for finding meaning in every nook and cranny of experience, in ways that are seemingly obsessive, borderline paranoid, and not infrequently obscene.
It’s no surprise, then, that he considers slips of the tongue — which now bear his name as Freudian slips — to be meaningful mistakes, insisting that they reveal something about the speaker: that these mis-sayings, nonetheless, say something.
This heavy-handed emphasis is tempered by one simple observation. Some slips appear not to relate to any disavowed intention on the part of the speaker (the standard Freudian hypothesis), but rather, the phonetic properties of the words involved.
Two examples of these slips come from my experiences in grad school, owing to my tendency to record, in the back of my notebooks, the various verbal mistakes of my professors — which sometimes yielded insights no less instructive than the contents of their lectures.
The first example comes from a lecture in Human Behavior and Development. The phrase was, “The last fifteen years or show”, with the intended phrase having been, “The last fifteen years or so show”.
