Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/124

 120 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 concern. Slight fluctuations in the condition of the speaker—physiological ones, such as fatigue, and, for the most part, psychological ones, such as excitement, apprehension, embarrassment—will induce variations in the nicety of adjustment that 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 departures from the intended design are so predominantly of a few types. There are the anticipations, the persistences, the interchanges, the substitutions 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 utterance, 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