Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Committed in speech, by me, on 7/27/26:

help get through me the day [1]

This is an error in the ordering of the parts, localized in the underlined portion.

[1] is the production. What was the target? What did I intend to say? There are two possibilities:

help me get through the day [3] (with reversal of the underlined adjacent constituents)

(side note: [1] is in fact a possible construction, though it’s very awkward, and has the wrong structure: it has through me as a constituent, which neither of the targets does)

Now the question is how any of this fits into what we (think we) know about reversal errors in syntax. There are important generalizations about the kinds of reversals we see again and again, generalizations that can then be used to suggest hypotheses about the processes of speech production; the overarching observation here is that we’re forever planning ahead, metaphorically assembling, in stages, chunks of stuff that will eventually get manifested in speech. Glitches in production are then indirect evidence about what’s going on behind the curtain. Some of them are extraordinarily common, others less so, and down the line, but we don’t see just random word jumbling.

The end of the story is that I have stumbled onto a vein of relatively uncommon reversal types (some of which Vicki Fromkin had already recorded), so it’s worth pointing out that they too are principled; I will characterize them roughly, as reversals of adjacent elements — as in [2] and [3], yielding [1].

Return with me now to my 8/22/11 posting “Reversal in the heat of the sexual moment”, an error, plus correction, from a gay porn film:

You wanna fuck your shooting load! You wanna shoot your fuckin’ load!

Word reversals preserve the prosody of the intended phrase, as in the porn example above. And, as in this example, the exchanged words are usually the same part of speech: verb for verb above, noun for noun in most cases, like Seymour sliced the knife with a salami for Seymour sliced the salami with a knife (Fromkin’s P2). (Words of unlike category are sometimes exchanged, but usually only when they’re adjacent: Does smoke Jack? for Does Jack smoke? (Fromkin’s P29). Errors like teeth my brush for brush my teeth [exchange of verb and noun] are rare, though this one did occur in the dementia-disordered speech of my partner Jacques (see here).)

(the example from J might have been facilitated by the fact that brush is also available as a noun)

VF explicitly articulates the adjacency clause in this passage. Parallel elements of both like and unlike category can be exchanged when they are merely adjacent: within N+N compounds (involving head and modifying N); for two modifiers of the same head; and for cases like [2] and [3]. (Some examples in section P (word reversals) of Fromkin’s Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence (available on-line here).)

Lesson time.

— We routinely discover system, order, and regulation through errors and offenses against order. We literally learn from our mistakes.

— Human behavior is hugely more regulated than people are inclined to think. Actual social disorganization is rare; it’s just that some of that organization involves stigmatized — offensive, criminal, threatening, dirty, dangerous etc. — activity, so it’s discounted. (I remind you that I have studied the regulation of male-male sex in subterranean settings — cruising, the gay baths, t-rooms, etc.)  In any case, expect order, everywhere.

— Seriously consider studying very small (and everyday) things, because they can take you to much bigger stuff (and anyway, they’re lots of fun on their own). Darwin and his earthworms is the model: Charles Darwin devoted 40 fucking years studying the minutiae of earthworm life, and it was in the end truly magnificent work.

This entry was posted on August 19, 2026 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Errors, Language production, Psychology of language, Word exchanges / reversals. 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.