Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On Facebook, Ry Schwark reports the following exchange:

Jenny: I miss Bukkake.
Me: (Stunned Silence)
Jenny: Yeah, I mean, the Japanese dance.
Me: You mean Butoh?
Jenny: Yeah, the other Japanese B thing.

This is about as clear an example of a Fay/Cutler malapropism as you could want.

F/C malaprops are phonologically-based errors in retrieval: during speech production, you reach for a word and get, not your intended target, but a phonologically similar word. The contrast is to “classical malapropisms” (of the Mrs. Malaprop sort), where the error is in storage rather than retrieval: for whatever reason, you have internalized the wrong phonology for a word — usually, phonology associated with a different word.

In Ry’s story, Jenny intends butoh, but retrieves bukkake instead; the error is encouraged by both words being associated with Japanese customs (Wikipedia pages: for butoh here and bukkake here).

It’s often hard to tell whether some particular example is a F/C malaprop or a CM, but sometimes speakers provide  feedback that reveals their intentions: they resolutely stick by their word choice (indicating a CM), or, as Jenny does above, they quickly recant (indicating a F/C malaprop).

A final word, about Ry’s Stunned Silence: bukkake — group ejaculation, as portrayed in porn films,  onto someone, originally a woman but then a man as well; and there’s a urinary variant — is a practice many people find unsavory, and it’s most often seen as humiliating, so Ry was of course taken aback when Jenny said she missed it.

This entry was posted on October 1, 2012 at 6:13 am and is filed under Errors, Gender and sexuality, Psychology of language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.