Oops! How’s That Again?

Types of Tongue Slips:

i) Mistranslation: mistake in translation

ii) Spoonerism: a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect, as in the sentence you have hissed the mystery lectures.

iii) verbal error: an accidental transposition of initial consonant sounds or parts of

words, especially one that has an amusing result, for example, “half-warmed fish”

for “half-formed wish”]

iii) Bloopers: Public blunder; spoken wrong in radio, press, etc.

an embarrassing error."he poked fun at his own tendency to utter bloopers"

iv) Faux pas: tactless mistake

an embarrassing or tactless act or remark in a social situation.

"‘I was suddenly sick in the back of their car’—it was years before he could confess his faux pas to them"

This lesson is concerned with the most natural aspect of human behavior – the speech mistakes. These mistakes have been discussed above, their direct examples in the chapter are:

Mistranslation:

“Come alive with Pepsi”. Some one trying to translate it from English into German language happened to translate as “Come alive out of the grave with Pepsi”. Yet, another person translated it as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave”.

Spoonerism

“You have hissed all my mystery lectures.” “You’ve tested the whole worm and must leave by the first town drain.” In fact, the speaker wanted to say you have missed all my history lectures. In fact, you’ve wasted the whole time and must leave by the first down train”. Another short example is “Our queer old dean (discipline maintaining teacher) instead of saying our dear old queen.

Bloopers:

“A blooper is a public blunder or an embarrassment mistake. Mostly, such mistakes are made on radio, television or perhaps in public speeches. For example, a radio announcer called “General Foods as General Fools”. Bloopers are the low line of verbal errors. They consist a large number of toilet jokes.

Faux pas:

The striking example of such mistake is the welcome of the Indian president by asking who are you? whereas, the man wanted to say how are you?

We must understand that these errors can happen from anyone, it is not something one wishes to do, and rather than dissing someone for it we must thrive to learn form those mistakes.