i2o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



equally at the skill of the verbal craftsman, who, like the other, must 

 take up each thread in just the right order, give it just the right twist, 

 and make of the whole amazingly intricate business not the seemingly 

 inevitable tangle, but a beautiful, orderly design. It is, indeed, easily 

 intelligible that, in moments of wavering oversight, slight snarls and 

 slips should occur. An intimate analysis of these lapses of speech 

 may reveal details, by no other evidence so clearly exhibited, in regard 

 to the subconscious operations that are normally required to shape sense 

 and utterance to a successful issue. 



The central relation seems to be this: the complexity of speech 

 requires the occupation with many processes at once, and some of these 

 — the nicer, more delicate, less familiar ones — will receive the major 

 attention, while the routine factors engage but a minor degree of con- 

 cern. Slight fluctuations in the condition of the speaker — physiolog- 

 ical ones, such as fatigue, and, for the most part, psychological ones, 

 such as excitement, apprehension, embarrassment — will induce varia- 

 tions in the nicety of adjustment tbat are recognizable as typical slips 

 of tongue or pen, and, still more significantly, of the tongue-and-pen- 

 guiding mechanism. Conformably to what is true of lapses of behavior 

 in general, such slips will be predominantly expressive in type. We 

 know what we wish to say; we give over the saying of it to the usual 

 faithful mechanism, which on this occasion drops a stitch, or takes up 

 the bobbins in wrong order, or plainly tangles the threads. With but 

 one right way and so many wrong ones, it is significant that our de- 

 partures from the intended design are so predominantly of a few types. 

 There are the anticipations, the persistences, the interchanges, the 

 substitutions 2 and the entanglements of letters, and of words and parts 

 of words, and of phrases — all of them indicative of shortcomings in 

 the minute distribution of attention and coordination. That which 

 is now subconsciously in the margin and is being prepared for utter- 

 ance, emerges ahead of its time; that which is waning after utterance 

 persists too long and reenters the articulatory field; or both processes 

 occur, the second, having usurped the place of the first, tumbles the 

 legitimate predecessor into its own vacancy, while the more variable 



2 1 shall not consider the difficulties of speech-coordination, such as speak- 

 ing, She sells sea shells, or, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, or in 

 German, Die Katze tritt die Treppe krumm, or individually tripping words such 

 as Detektivtaktik, though these are nothing more than pronounced cases of cer- 

 tain of the lapses considered. The one offers intrinsically difficult coordina- 

 tions, upon which even deliberate effort may trip; while the other is usually 

 accomplished with ease, but under released tension of guidance invites failure. 

 Likewise have I, in citing instances, passed at once to the more complex and 

 more natural ones, omitting those of formally simpler type. I must acknowl- 

 edge my indebtedness for most of the illustrations to H. Heath Bawden: A 

 Study of Lapses, 1900; and to Meringer and Meyer: Yersprechen und Ver- 

 lesen, 1895. 



