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 get me through the day [2] (with reversal of the underlined adjacent words)
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].
