A Freudian slip is a “slip” of the tounge where you say something closer to what you are thinking, and less what you actually wanted to say.
I have been in a few chat rooms, where a typo occurs, and the result could be viewed as a freudian slip.
Is the process of typing to far removed from speech, that it can not happen, OR are those that have a high enough WPM able to combat the difference?
Can a freudian slip happen in Chat rooms or in Instant Messages?
Post #2 here gave birth to a SDMB meme-- penis ensues
I do this all the freaking time. There’s some sort of mental disconnect and instead of a one-letter typo, I find that I’ve just typed a real, complete word that was not the word I’d intended to type.
Then again, I also malaprop similar-sounding words into my speech when I get tired. I think that there’s probably some sort of auditory cross-memory wiring that’s screwed up.
So THAT’s where that came from. I was wondering.
Ditto. It is one of the weirdest things. And it is usually a synonym of the word I was planning (though not necessarily an embarrassing one, such as in the OP).
It really freaks me out. Especially because I can’t touch-type, and usually have my eyes on the keyboard while I’m pressing the buttons. (I’m not hunt-and-peck, my fingers have a pretty good idea of where the keys are, but my error rate zooms sky-high when I take my eyes off the keys.)
I know a guy who keeps typing “running” accidentally. That has to be a Freudian connection there.
In addition to “Freudian” typos, there is a muscle memory thing where touch typists will unconciously complete partial words.
Back in the MSDOS days, I had a boss who would routinely type “dirt” instead of “dir” . We’d put a dirt.bat (.bat files predatede .com files) on all the computers that would echo “Hi Steve!”
Not so much the synonym thing - more that the first few letters of the word are right, and then the brain hit autopilot.
As an example, while typing out this post I wrote “think” for “thing” above. The K is nowhere near the G, but some bizarre part of the brain said that that was the letter that came next.
It doesn’t have to be typing. You can write them too. My 2nd grade teacher was teaching civics and needed to go get equipment to show overheads. She was writing about the two chambers of congress on the board while thinking about this equipment.
Apparently, Congress consists of the Senate and the House of Projectors.
Heh, I did that just today. I work at a print shop and was doing design on a flyer. I typed “Let us be your color copy connection”, or so I thought. Looking back, I realzed “Letter us be…”. Between looking at the word “letterhead” and the “Letter” size paper option in print dialogs must have ingrained the word in my head.
The other day, I was typing “Hicks”, the last name of a customer, but accidentally typed “dicks”. I’m not sure I even want to know why I did that.
I tend to do the opposite, typing “ing” because that’s how so many words end. Also “tion.” I just think of it as my fingers having minds of their own.
Superb username / post combo …
On several levels.
I would say that for a high enough WPM rate, one would be MORE prone to this sort of error. I type very quickly, and often times am just a tick behind what I’m thinking about saying. The conversion into text from my “mind’s mouth” happens without any thought as to what my fingers need to do, in the same manner as my speech happening without thinking about how to move my tongue/mouth/voice box.
Typos do slow me down, and often that’s how I catch “the errors” to which you refer.
I think the written word, even in IM or chat rooms, gives an opportunity to edit out some of the errors that you can’t take back with the spoken word. The typed words don’t “enter the world” until you hit <enter>. The spoken ones are gone before you know it.
I have no references for this point of view, but I think only typist with little experience will type out Freudian slips. Most typos are because one word is more common than another, and so the typist automatically types it.
But I suppose in a very emotional email exchange it can happen. Also, many folks (like me) aren’t too good at spelling.
Last week, I was teaching a class on PowerPoint and had cause to mention YouTube. I had over the remainder of the class to repeated mentally assure myself that I had not somehow said Tube8 instead of YouTube.
Yes, I know this has nothing to do with the topic. Sorry.
Writing doesn’t preclude it - there was a kid at my high school who had a name similar to “Anthony Able”. He wrote his name on at least two exam papers as “Anthony Anthony” - with several years between the stuff-ups.