The thing that seemed to most upset a lot of people about the state taking over the Little Rock School District wasn't that a state agency was sticking its nose into local business. Oh, no.
It was Arkansas Education Commissioner Tony Wood's unfortunate choice of pronouns, as reported in our story the next day:
"'School will be held in the morning,' Wood said just after the state Education Board's vote. 'Buses will run, lunch will be served and children will learn. Fundamentally this is a change in the governance, in the administration, of the district. The superintendent is still in place. This forges an opportunity for he and I to work together to try to make things better. School will go on successfully.'"
For those playing at home, he should have used the object form of those pronouns--him and me, rather than he and I. Because of that slip, there's seemingly been no end to the offense shown by those who profess great love for grammar.
I, on the other hand, will cut him some slack. I know, I know, how dare I?!?
In high school and college, I did a lot of public speaking, and quite a bit of broadcast reporting. When I had a script, I had no problem. Speaking extemporaneously, however, I could be more than a little awkward, as my mouth worked faster than my brain did at times. Sure, it was sometimes very entertaining for the audience, but for me it was just painful, and oftentimes I would hear myself saying something that might make the English teacher in the family smack me (OK, no, she's too sweet to do that). Strangely, I've never had the same problem when improv acting, perhaps because I'm portraying a character.
I communicate much better in writing, especially when asked to talk off the top of my head, so I understand and can excuse Mr. Wood's grammatical slip ... as long as he doesn't make a habit of it.
Such errors are inevitable in our everyday speech. In 2012, Psychology Today reported that we make one or two errors per every 1,000 words spoken, which in a day might amount to somewhere between seven and 22 slips.
Sometimes, they're simple grammar errors such as that made by Mr. Wood. Other times, they might be embarrassing/entertaining gaffes known since the 1950s as Freudian slips. Sigmund Freud early in the 20th Century posited that such mistakes reveal what is in the subconscious. Sooo ... when Ted Kennedy said "breast" rather than "best" in that televised speech on education ...
Another such mistake is the spoonerism, which is the transposition of initial sounds of words or syllables. The brain slip named after William Archibald Spooner often results in such phrases as, "It is now kisstomary to cuss the bride." Poor bride. And poor Spooner, to whom many phrases have been attributed that he never said. He can join the club with Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain.
A malapropism is yet another slip. Named after Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, it's the misuse of a word by confusing it with a similar-sounding word. Former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, for example, once was said to have called the lack of parking spaces in the city "an Alcatraz around my neck." Menino, who died in October, was notorious for such slips, earning the nickname "Mumbles."
A less-well-known but no less potentially funny error is the eggcorn, in which an original word is replaced with a similar-sounding word that still makes a kind of sense, such as "ex-patriot" for "expatriate."
And then there's the mondegreen, which is a word or phrase resulting from having misheard something. The term originated with author Sylvia Wright, who as a child misheard part of the lyric "thou hae slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green," from "The Bonny Earl of Murray," as "Lady Mondegreen." Lovers of misheard song lyrics (of which I am one) have doubtless heard of "'scuse me while I kiss this guy," "the girl with colitis goes by," or "someone shaved my wife tonight." If you haven't, you really need to. And good luck ever hearing those lyrics correctly again.
According to linguists, as noted by Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe in late 2013 as the stumble-prone Menino was preparing to step down, verbal errors don't necessarily mean the speaker is an idiot:
"'People view language as a window onto the soul or the mind,' Ariel Goldberg, a psychologist at Tufts University who studies speech errors, told me. 'But this stuff [i.e., verbal stumbles] doesn't correlate with intelligence.' What makes politicians notable stumblers (think George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden) is not brains or education, or even the relative number of stumbles they make. It has more to do with how stumbles feed a political persona--authentic and folksy, foot-in-mouth idiot, or some combination."
All this to say: Tony Wood is likely not the dummy some are painting him to be. He is, though, undoubtedly human, and as such, is entitled to the occasional misspeak.
Yes, you can still make light of those errors. I won't spoil all your fun. Word nerds need something to amuse them.
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Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Read her blog at blooper0223.wordpress.com.
Editorial on 02/04/2015