Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/127

 Rh and interchanging parts of words, and parts of phrases, yield to confusion because of the psychological equivalence of the confused portions. Such equivalence of value or function in the attentive consciousness of the sentence-builder is determined by many considerations. Similarity of sound; similarity of stress; similarity in the syntax of phrases; similarity of position; similarities due to subjective attitudes—all enter in separate or combined form. Most conspicuous are confusions of the initial sounds of words; those for the leading words in the sentence receive about the same prominence of emphasis; thus corch and pool, noyful and joise, waiter and wetter. The reader need only reread the series of lapses just recorded, with his attention directed to the relative balance or equivalence of the confused sounds and words, to find convincing proof of the parallelism that determines such confusion. There is even a slight advantage in taking foreign sounds in which, with the meaning less prominent, the sound-values to our apperception stand out more conspicuously. We can appreciate how readily Alabasterbüchse becomes Alabüchsebaster (interchange), or Alabasterbachse (persistence), or Alabüsterbüchse (anticipation); while Paprikaschnitzel not only emerges as Piprikaschnatzel and the other variants, but is even recorded as being contorted into Schniprikapatzl. When, however, fröhliche Festfeier emerges before the astonished hearers as Festliche Fressfeier, one appreciates that the accidental pertinence of the result may have been a still deeper subconscious inducement to attract the utterance into the form that likewise meets the linguistic expectations.

What all this means in terms of psychological processes is that the constructive consciousness requires and utilizes the marginal areas that spread to either side of the progressive focus of utterance. The wider this span, the greater the area within which confusion is possible. Ordinarily lapses are confined to elements close to the central moment; occasionally they extend to the next line or the next measure of thought, while in leading up to a climax, the speaker maintains a distant subconsciousness thereof and occasionally betrays the fact by an inadvertent precipitation of what was to have been the final triumphant flourish. Quite the same relation holds within the sentence when it is a long and complex one. The German construction has an unenviable reputation in this respect, and certainly makes strenuous demands upon the architectural skill of the sentence-builder; the inclusion and sub-inclusion of phrase within phrase, each with rigidly regulated gender and case and mood and tense forms, the distant relations of the parts of the separable verbs, and the final mood and tense auxiliaries that must ever be held in mind to round up the series of grammatical obligations incurred en route,—these demand a wide and alert spread of consciousness and permit of little loitering by the wayside.