overshoes became ruvvershoes. With spank in mind, the threat to paddle the refractory youngster became, Well, I'll spaddle you[1] and a too hesitant wavering between it mists and it drizzles resulted in it mizzles. Unexpectedly lucid is the betrayal of an after-dinner speaker who planned to begin, unprepared as I am (Unvorbereitet wie ich bin), but had as a fact carefully rehearsed his part, and who actually said, unprepared as I have myself (Unvorbereitet wie ich mich habe).[2] Choosing between Scherz and Spass, the speaker said Das ist kein Sperz, just as we might say, That is no jost (jest and joke). Wishing to impart the information that he was at home until seven o'clock, and that indeed he was writing until that hour, the speaker said (and might just as well have written), I was at home until seven o'clock was I writing. The process has been graphically presented by indicating by the heavy line the above-the-threshold processes, and by the dotted line the sub-threshold impulses, the crossing point being the point of intrusion of the one into the field of the other.
Or thus:
The fact that we carry on a manifold activity in the expression of thought is thus sufficiently indicated, and finds marked parallelism, so far as the lapses are concerned, in the interchange of activities (the
- ↑ Nonsense word makers (Lewis Carroll, Edwin Lear, et alii) seem to be guided by a feeling for this process, along with many other more fanciful and onomatopoetic attractions. The Hunting of the Snark may have a suggestion of a snake and a shark; Torrible Zone suggests torrid and horrible; slithy may be slimy and writhy. Yet these verbal acrobatics naturally involve, as well, any forms of contortion that give amusement and the sound-semblance of sense. Lewis Carroll's own characteristic elucidation is as follows: "For instance, take the two words fuming and furious. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but have it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards fuming, you will say fuming-furious; if they turn, even by a hair's breadth, towards furious, you will say furious-fuming; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say frumious."
- ↑ I am assured that there is a tendency among the philologists to account for the paradoxical use of the negative and the intrusion of the negative in constructions in which it seems logically out of place, by this process of heading for the gateway of utterance with a double team, only one member of which can and should get through; it is as though the one that succeeds takes with it the harness of the other. The Frenchman seemingly has in mind to say both I fear my father will see me, and simultaneously I hope my father will not see me; and actually allows himself to say I fear my father will not see me. Similarly, with John is taller than James in mind, but also thinking the same thought as James is not as tall as John, the spirit of the Romance language constructions tolerates John is taller than James is not. Independently of the proof that may be brought to bear upon the correctness of this suggestion, it is interesting to consider whether the mental tendency, that gives rise to lapses of speech, may not also have been influential in shaping linguistic construction and usage.
