Roger Rosenblatt
“Oops! How’s That Again” is an
essay written by Rosenblatt and this essay has a humorous tone. Through the
humorous tone also, the essayist has tried to reflect the bitter reality of
human beings when they make mistake when they speak. He enriches his discussion
with remarkable examples; although, as befits its subject. He is much concerned
with the psychological causes of mistakes.
Human beings often make mistake
knowingly and unknowingly when they speak. After making mistake they also
apologize for it. From the uneducated person to highly intellectual and
educated, scholar, different mistakes are made according to their level. This
essay describes the mistake the people make while speaking and the reasons
behind it are divided into four categories. They are as follows: i. Public Blunders ii. Memorable Translations iii. Bloopers
iv. Spoonerisms.
Public Blunders are the mistakes
made by the people when they give speech. While delivering the speech, they
don’t actually care for the grammatical mistakes or vocabulary mistakes. These
mistakes are specially committed by especially by the political leaders when
they deliver their speech. They try to give emphasis by giving different
examples but their sentences are not totally complete. This happens due to
their tongue slip. Here the speaker may be trying to give message from one view
but the different audience may take it in wrong way.
Memorable translations are the
mistakes generally done by the people who speak very fast. This is also related
to the psychological condition of the listener. The words spoken by the fast
speaker may not be easily understood the real words. There may be
misunderstanding between the speaker and listener. The person with weak
psychology, if, wrongly interprets the words of the speaker, it may bring
violent situation.
Bloopers are the mistakes done
foolishly and not tried to correct. These mistakes are very simple types of
mistakes, which are not given much importance by the speaker. This may be the
habit of some people.
Spoonerisms are the mistakes,
which are done by the use of incorrect words due to tongues slips. Here, wrong
words are not known by the listener as the speaker immediately tries to replace
the wrong word when he comes to know the mistake. While the replacement of
words the speaker should be conscious as wrong replacement can misinterpret the
actual meaning.
There are different views about
the verbal errors according to different people. Victoria Fromkin, a linguist,
says that the verbal errors happen due to tongue slips concerned with the
brain. Before the words are expressed, thought is placed by the brain into a
grammatical framework. Sigmund Freud, a psychiatrist, presents his theory about
the verbal error in different way. According to him, a tongue slips are caused
by the network of id (unconscious mind), ego (subconscious mind) and superego
(conscious mind). When people make mistakes, it has become the trend to laugh
at them. Why do we laugh at them we don’t know. According to the philosopher
Henri Bergson, the act of laughter is caused by any interruption of normal
human fluidity or momentum. So, tongue slips are like slips of banana peels. We
simply make fun and hoot at the errors simply to break the monotonies.
