This thread was inspired by an extremely recent event.
A housekeeper walked by my office and said hello. I started to reply likewise, but just as my mouth was starting to talk, my brain decided that I wanted to say “hi” instead. What came out was “hloi.”
I do this all the time. Do you?
Not all the time, but every now and then. I always feel sheepish when I do it, too. Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but as you note, it seems to mostly happen with opening salutations or goodbyes. Like your brain has two equivilent words it can use, and you begin to utter one, then switch to the other halfway through.
It almost feels involuntary, and it’s very awkward because I wonder what the other person is thinking. Of all the times it’s happened, I can’t ever remember someone calling me on it.
Me too.
Me neither.
M’to
Many years ago, I was reading a book by one of my favorite cartoonists (he writes in Spanish, Quino). In one of the joke panels, I notice one of the characters (a demon) was saying “jod…ño” before going on with what he was saying. It didn’t take long for my dad and I to decipher that it was a combination of two cursewords, but instead of saying it, the writer smashed them.
I now regularly write jodño when I want to say a bad word but can’t.
I “stammer” when I speak, and if I’m speaking to a stranger I become near mute. I was asked in a hotel what I would like for breakfast the following morning, I hadn’t expected to be asked this and hadn’t rehearsed what to say (I used to script conversations I’d be likely to have with people in these situations so that I could converse without mucking up what I was trying to say)
Had I had a practice run, I’d have said “toast and coffee please” but what I actually ended up saying was “coast peas”
I faked a coughing fit while I mentally rehearsed the correct line…
If the guy noticed, he didn’t say anything!
I did this a couple of weeks ago. I bought a wrap that happened to have glitter on it a few hours before we went to a fundraiser. In discussing that it was leaving glitter everywhere, I accidentally said it was “glitterally” everywhere, or something like that. My husband and I laughed, but it did seem to fit the sentence. I also once used “hapful” in a conversation with him, which was a combination between happy and some other word I can’t remember right now.
Wonderful?
Yes, that’s probably it.
All the damn time. I’m in a customer service job, so you’d think I’d know how to speak properly by now, but nope.
I don’t do it between similar words that often, but my brain often reformulates sentences when I am in the middle of them and makes me sound like a jackass by inventing words.
Example.
1st. thought “I’ll rewrite the document to make it clearer”.
2nd thought after brevity optimization “I’ll clarify the document”.
Actual output after my instinctual conjugation forces it’s way in also . "I’ll reclarificate the document.
I do it all the time on purpose - marvelicious, awesomtastic, fantabulous, superific…etc. I sometimes whoops and do one too, with less wonderistic results.
I’ve been known to tell my wife her dinners are delishful.
This happens to me with the words “kind” and “type.” One time I tried to say something like, “She drinks a different kind of soda,” but it took at least three tries for me to not say a hybrid of kind and type.
Positutely.