Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/126

 122 means certain, to become aware of the lapse; but when it has the glib sound or semblance of sense, it passes unnoticed before the sensory sentinel. The much-cited scholar who spoke of the half-warmed fish that one feels in one's breast (half-formed wish) perhaps reached the acme of sensible sounding absurdity. On the same plane is the statement that We have a very queer dean (a very dear Queen); while the speaker who converted little ditches branching off into little britches dancing off, departed from strict linguistic interchange by the logical attractions of dancing (it should have been danching).

It is to be noted that most of these lapses are peculiar to speech (vocal utterance), because this is the more fluent, more automatic expression; and further that these speech-lapses are apt to be favored by any slight indisposition or fatigue or excitement. One collector of such linguistic frailties notes that they occur more frequently at the end of an evening's conversation than at the beginning. Certain of the lapses are characteristically oral; a smaller class graphic; still others common to both forms of expression; while even in that half-innervated process of reading to one's self, or formulating one's thought in words (as in preparing for an address) do these lapses become cognizable to the semi-articulate consciousness. The lapses of writing are both less frequent and simpler than those of speech, because in writing we proceed by smaller units, and write as a rule with more alert attention than we give to casual talk or even to careful utterance. Graphic lapses will accordingly be apt to occur in rapid and absorbed composition in which thought runs well ahead of execution, or will occur in ordinary writing and be slight in character. By virtue of the same relations, the more poised temperaments and deliberate speakers on the one hand, and those whose expertness in speech does not permit them so readily to commit execution to subconscious guidance (children and the uncultivated) on the other, will not be as subject to speech-lapses as the more fluent and venturesome speakers. Lapses of speech, like lapses of conduct, are favored by that inattention which we are disposed to give to ingrained and well-habituated activities.

Interrupting the taking of testimony at this point to interpret the evidence, it is obvious that these lapses follow definite trends, illustrative of our psycho-linguistic mechanism. Both anticipated and