OOPS! HOW’S THAT AGAIN

OOPS! HOW’S THAT AGAIN

               “Oops! How’s that Again?” is a humorous essay about bloopers with a great deal of psychological information about such verbal errors. It is written by an American writer, Roger Rosenblatt. The essay deals with different types of errors and psychological causes from such errors and types of laughter.

              While illustrating the errors, the writer divides them into slips of the tongue, mistranslation, bloopers and spoonerism and faus pas. He cites number of examples for each type of the error committed by celebrities. A slip of the tongue refers to the verbal error which is relatively a minor error that takes place in course of conversation. He gives some of the instances when the great personalities like Nancy Regan, France’s Prime Minister Raymond Barre and Businessman Peter Balfour etc. committed such errors. As for mistranslation, the writer explains that such errors result when different expressions are translated from one language into another. For instance, the slogan “Come Alive with Pepsi” was translated in German as “Come Alive out of the Grave with Pepsi”. Germany’s President Heinrich Lubke is one more example as a person known to have committed this type of error. Bloopers are embarrassing errors made in public. The writer gives the example of Radio Announcer Harry who announced the name of Herbert Hoover as Heaver on the radio. Spoonerisms are the errors committed when the syllables of the words get replaced with one another.

              The writer presents the explanations given by psychologists and linguistics. Victoria From kin of the linguistics department at U.C.L.A. regards slips as clues about how the brain stores and articulates language. She believes that thought is placed by the brain into a grammatical framework before it is expressed. Freud removed the element of accident from language with his explanation of slips as being the result of the operations of unconscious wishes. A psychiatrist, Richard suggests that the incorrect words exist in associative chains with correct ones known as a kind of ‘dream pair’. Errors result when incorrect word is articulated Psychoanalyst Ludwig suggests that a slip of tongue involves the entire network of id, ego and superego.

              The writer points out different reasons for laughter at such mistakes. One of the reasons is that conventional discourse is so predictable and boring that any deviation comes as delightful relief. Another reason is our meanness. It makes us laugh to see the embarrassment of the miss peaker, similarly the most charitable and optimistic thoughts of the blunderer cause kindly laugh. For instance, Gerald Ford’s famous error in 1976 that Poland was not under Soviet domination showed his optimistic thought about Poland’s freedom in future and it caused a pleasant laugh. Sometimes the bizarre mistakes disclose a whole new world of logic and possibility. This also causes laughter which is the most interesting one. Finally there is sympathetic laugh that sees into the essential nature of a slip of the tongue with a perfect understanding.