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alcor.concordia.ca>I'm sorry if this was in the original post, but it seems obvious to me that phonological misprocessing is not the only possible type of "slip" we could be dealing with, indeed, I don't know the "speech error" literature all that well but "fak" for "frank" seems totally out as a likely error, in my view (has anyone looked at the phonological context?). Surely the suspicion must be that this is a privately used slur of Representative Frank that crept into public discourse -- i.e., it was a register problem rather than a phonological one. It would seem unfortunate (just to respond to the "political agenda" part of an earlier post) if we as linguists refused to bring our competence to bear on questions such as this for fear of being "politicized". MarkMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
u.washington.edu>Could someone provide the context for Dick Armey's utterance of "Barney Fag"? I only heard it once and didn't write it down. My impression at the time, however, was that the phonological environment didn't seem quite right for a spoonerism. One other thought: It seems that a binary opposition between an intentional slur on Armey's part and a purely phonological slip doesn't represent all the possibilities. It's certainly possible that if the string "Barney Fag" has been used often enough on Capitol Hill in the hearing of Dick Armey, he might very well have inadvertently substituted it for Frank's actual name. Isn't that something that's done all the time: accidentally saying something that one has heard recently or repeatedly. "Can't get that tune out of my head!" Seems like a reasonable explanation for a "slip" that wasn't a spoonerism. Anything on non-spoonerism phonological slips out there that bears on this? Phil GainesMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
parc.xerox.com>So Dave Wharton, having determined that the delay between Richard Armey's "Barney Fag" remark and its correction lasted less than a second, is confident that it must have been "a slip and not a slur" (presumably blameless), all the more since Armey has a Ph.D. and a wealth of political savvy and "would not think it to his advantage to make such an utterance." A victim, then, of linguists with ulterior agendas. How in the in the world is one to respond to such a statement? If Wharton had made the suggestion 75 years ago you might repeat the observation that Freud offered in the Introductory Lectures to the effect that the merely somatic or phonetic concommitents of slips can't explain why they occur when they do -- as he put it, it's like telling a policeman that the darkness of the night and the isolation of the street have caused your purse to be snatched. What might have possessed Armey, then? The New Republic has pointed out that he was one of only forty-seven members (Gingrich was not among them) who voted against George Bush's Hate Crime Statistics Act, which allowed the government to record violence against homosexuals; that he voted to exclude people with AIDS from the Americans with Disabilities Act; that he voted to deny government funds to groups that boycotted the Boy Scouts of America on the grounds of that organization's anti-gay policies; and that he refused to sign a voluntary statement saying that his own office didn't discriminate against homosexuals. Of course the remark wasn't "intentional," but the evidence is pretty thick that Armey harbors just the sorts of inner demons who would have been lying in wait for any breach in conscious attention. Most inhabitants of the late 20th century will acknowlege some acquaintance with pesky creatures like these, and you would think that it would be only by an act of willful repression that someone could deny their existence entirely. But maybe we should give Wharton the benefit of the doubt; maybe his is a genuine Victorian innocence. Only, just think of it! All those theorists arguing that we are living the twilight of modernist era, when there are still people (with an "edu" in their address, yet) on whom it has not even begun to dawn.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>Having read all of the research literature on slips of the tongue and having scanned them in both normal and aphasic corpora, I find it hard to believe that this much discussed slip was linguistic tho it may, in some sense, have been Freudian. Bob WachalMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
salvador.speech.lsu.edu>
Slurs...I mean, Sirs:
Armey's slip could very well have been a slip, but a slip of this sort
represents a competing plan, and one can then ask, why the competing
plan? Phonological similarity ("similarity" being the Aristotean
catch-all) [ /fraenk/ vs. /faeg/] or something more like Bernie Baars's
"unintentional" pun, clearly indicating something a bit more than
raw phonological similarity. The non-phonological, competing plan
notion brings up all sorts of interpretive issues concerning why Armey
may or may not have had something painfully abusive "on his mind" when
he produced "fag." If it had been "on his mind," it was (at that point
in time during on-line speech) not anything typically volitional and
intentional. These are tricky issues.
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