Of Freud's many contributions to psychology, perhaps the most well-known is the "Freudian slip"- the idea that forbidden unconscious wishes insert themselves unwillingly into our speech. Jokes about the Freudian slip are common such as its definition "when you say one thing but mean your mother." Then there's the oft-cited joke -- a married couple is having breakfast, and instead of asking for the orange juice, the husband says "I hate you, you (w)itch" (depending on your audience substitute "b" for "w").
So we all know about the Freudian slip, but is it really true that every verbal mistake you make is a peek into your hidden, ugly, desires? Psycholinguists have studied this problem and conclude that it's more likely that a Freudian slip is really a phonetic slip. A phoneme, the smallest unit of speech, gets put in the wrong place and -voila- you have an unintentional utterance.
As you'll learn here, unintentional errors and other communication problems can cause problems that will make it harder for you to get the most out of your life. Whether it's by blowing a job interview or annoying your best friend, your sense of fulfillment will suffer unless you can use communication to your advantage.
Consider the following example. A leader of a women's political organization, who she is trying to unite, exhorts her audience with the rallying cry: "We must work together in CONDOM!" Of course, she meant to say "tandem." So why did she say condom? If Freud was asked to comment, he would say that clearly, the speaker had something on her mind other than her political cause. A psycholinguist would argue, instead, that she had made a phonemic error by switching "CO" for "TA" (ignoring the spelling difference between the ends of the words). Freud might win out in this debate because the error clearly had a sexual meaning. The speaker's slip showed that her mind wasn't on politics at all.
Similarly, let's say you decide to support a friend of yours in a local election and send an email to this effect. You get an email acknowledgement in return: "Thanks so much for your kind words and for your toe." Freud would probably be stumped by this one. He wouldn't be able to argue that your friend was grateful for your promise to ship your little pinky. The psycholinguist prevails-- "t" got swapped for "v" in the first phoneme and the "t" simply got left out at the end of the word. No hidden meanings there, just careless thinking and sloppy typing. Freud was incorrectly credited with having said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." In this case, he might have said "sometimes a cigar is just a tiger."
Psycholinguists actually talk about three types of phonemic errors. In anticipation, a later phoneme is swapped for an earlier one such as "The book was a meal mystery." In perseveration, an earlier phoneme reappears in a later word -- "He pulled a pantrum." Reversal is the third type of error. Two initial phonemes are mistakenly substituted for each other in a two word phrase, as in "She made a po(p)py of her caper." This last phonemic error is also called a "Spoonerism" after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner's "tips of the slongue." Attributed to Spooner are such gems as "Queer old Dean." The Washington-based comedy troupe, Capital Steps, writes an entire skit called "Lirty Dies" full of intentional Spoonerisms poking fun at our nation's leaders. Here's one example, in their routine on the 2008 U.S. Presidential election: "Then there was Ritt Momney. A former movernor of Gas-achusetts. He was a stashing dud. And he loved to show his tiny sheeth."
In your own life, phonemic errors, a.k.a. Freudian slips, can potentially get you in trouble. Errors in speech can make you look sloppy and unprofessional, and if you pull a gaffe when you are trying to make a point, your point will be lost. Bad luck for you if you're a celebrity making a verbal gaffe. You might qualify for the "Foot in Mouth Award" given by the British Plain English campaign.
Let's turn not, I mean now, to the second set of linguistic traps- the ambiguity. Shakespeare was the master of intentional ambiguity as in the opening line to Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York." To understand this, you have to realize that Richard isn't exactly happy about the "son of York," so it is meant to be sarcastic, not complimentary. The ambiguity is in the word "son" which could also mean "sun." Parenthetical note- this is the line that Freud borrowed from in his book, "The Winter of our Discontent."
Puns are based on ambiguity. Everyone is familiar with the double entendre, the staple of many punsters such as Jay Leno's "Headlines." A set of ambiguous headlines occasionally make their way through email chain letters-- "Prostitutes Appeal to Pope," "Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over, " etc. etc. Puns are great for humorists but they're not so fantastic if you're trying to be taken seriously.
Ambiguity also causes frustration in the people you are addressing. It's annoying to have to read a sentence over and over to figure out what a writer is trying to say. One of the worst forms of ambiguity is the "garden path sentence." This form of ambiguity gets its name from the fact that when you begin the sentence you are led "down the garden path" (a figure of speech itself). You think the sentence means one thing when you start to read it but by the time you get to the end of the sentence you realize it means something completely different. In some cases, the sentence seems ungrammatical but it really isn't- it's just confusing.
Here's one that is pretty easy to get: "The horse raced past the barn fell." This garden path sentence looks ungrammatical sentence at first read but then you get the "aha" moment when you realize the horse THAT WAS raced past the garden FELL DOWN. Researchers observing the eye movements of people reading garden path sentences find that when subjects get to the word "fell" they have to go back to the beginning of the sentence and read it all over again, this time forming new conclusions about whether the sentence is grammatical and if so, what it means.
People don't like to read garden path sentences because they take longer to process. We'd much prefer to move along jauntily as we read, not having to go back and rethink something we had already formed a conclusion about (a principal called "minimal parsing"). Researchers use garden path sentences because they provide a perfect opportunity to learn about how people process language. When they add eye movement tracking methods and even brain scans to the mix, they have a pretty powerful way to analyze what goes on in the language processing areas of the brain.
But returning to rules of effective communication, ambiguity is something you definitely want to avoid. You will be misunderstood, an unwitting butt of someone's joke, or criticized for being a poor writer or thinker.
Good speaking requires another element, though, and that is careful discourse planning. When you speak, you don't have a chance to go backwards and edit what you've said. Spoken words are understood in linear order. Discourse planning means that you have to prepare your sentences "in your head" before you utter them. The classic example of great discourse planning is the statement by Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind (the movie) to a distressed Scarlett O'Hara: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." The sentence just wouldn't have packed that punch if he'd said "I don't give a hoot what happens to you, Scarlett, and oh, by the way, I'm leaving your now, forever, really."
