Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (64 page)

All these blends are utterances that we heard and transcribed while listening to ourselves, our families, our friends, our colleagues, and also the radio and other media. Readers who are fluent speakers of American English will probably enjoy trying to pinpoint the contributing phrases (keeping in mind that the number often exceeds two).

Many of the above “mushy meshes” are humorous, and thanks to having been set in a frame and highlighted in italics, they may seem blatantly obvious after the fact. And yet in the absence of frames or italic highlighting, only a very careful listener will consciously notice clunkers of this sort, even when the two (or more) “notes” are played loudly. Indeed, most lexical blends are picked up on by absolutely no one — neither by the speaker nor by listeners. Strange though it may seem, fluent speakers generally “hear” only the idea that was
intended
, rather than the words that hit their eardrums.

Although lexical blending is seldom noticed, it is rampant, and with some training and some careful attention, any interested observer of language and thought can start noticing the phenomenon and writing down examples of it. Moreover, recorded speech can convince skeptics that everyday speech is in fact riddled with lexical blends that escape the ear.

Our error collection was launched decades before the Web existed, and of course we never dreamed that such a powerful and public linguistic treasurehouse would one day arise. By doing simple Web searches, we have come to realize that quite a few of the errors that we once presumed were unique events in the history of the world have been independently recommitted by dozens or even hundreds of people as they type up their Web sites. It’s quite amazing. Interested readers can do searches for various blends and find how often they appear. A few of the multifarious blends that we’ve collected are still one-of-a-kind events, but many are a dime a dozen.

Once one has gotten sensitized to noticing lexical blends, blend-collecting can become quite addictive. The great appeal of blends is the rich window that, taken collectively, they offer onto the mind. They reveal that behind the scenes, as people struggle to convert their thoughts into words under the real-time pressures of everyday communication, the analogies they make in the intense effort to simplify and compress complex situations down to their essences are in constant unconscious competition with each other. Although the frenetic competition more often than not results in clear-cut hands-down winners, at times it will happen that no one category is a clear winner, and as a result, two or more lexical items — the standard verbal labels of the competing categories — will vie with one another to get themselves uttered at the same time. In such cases, snippets of the rival items will get interwoven in the speech chain and thus will emerge strange, unpredictable hybrids like the many phrases exhibited above. We will now examine a handful of examples more carefully.

One day while talking on the telephone, a doggedly determined dean came out with the following remark about a famous and admired researcher who was the target of an intense recruitment campaign at the dean’s university:

We’ll pull no stops unturned to get him to come here.

Smiling inaudibly, the listener at the other end whipped out his little notebook from his back pocket and transcribed these words instantly, lest he forget them, and ever since that day, this short remark has been one of our favorite examples of the phenomenon of lexical blending. Despite the many years that have gone by since then, this remarkable blend still affords us today a glimpse of the meshing and churning of the metaphorical gears going on inside the dean’s brain way back then.

Why did the ardent dean not correct this strange phrase that had popped out of his own mouth? Surely he didn’t think that “to pull no stops unturned” is a standard English idiom — so why didn’t he pause, backtrack, and self-correct? Well, exactly the same question can be asked about all blends and all speakers, for we all make similar errors that simply go unnoticed. Most readers will probably chuckle at many of the defective phrases that we have blatantly framed in this discussion, but the fact is that every day, every reader of this book, just like both of its authors, comes out with similarly flawed constructions, but since no one explicitly puts frames around them, they are not very likely to be noticed.

Two rival categories in the dean’s mind were the
pull-out-all-the-stops
category and the
leave-no-stone-unturned
category. The lexical label of the first category is a phrase that originated in the playing of pipe organs, and it means that the music will be blasted out into the church as loudly as possible. (A stop is a device that blocks a particular organ pipe, and thus the pulling-out of all stops means that all the organ’s pipes will sound.) Since first being uttered, the phrase has of course spread by analogy and taken on the meaning of going all-out in trying to achieve a goal, not holding anything back.

As for the second category, its lexical label alludes to a desperate search process in which something has been lost and one wishes to check in every possible place — under every metaphorical stone — no matter how unlikely it might be. Once again, the idea is that of going all-out in the pursuit of a cherished goal.

The two rival analogies that sprang to life in the dean’s mind involved seeing the faculty-recruitment situation as one in which a crucial and important goal was being pursued by every possible means, as urgently and intensely as possible. We can exhibit the roles played by the two component phrases as follows:

The numerals “1” through “4” show the zigzagging order in which fragments belonging to the two rival lexical items were picked out. Note that fragment 2 consisted not just of the word “no” but also of the initial consonant cluster “st” of “stones”, which coincides with the initial consonant cluster of fragment 3, which is the word “stops”. In all likelihood, this fortuitous phonetic overlap of the words “stones” and “stops” was a
contributing element that made it easier to follow this zigzagging pathway, rather than some other pathway, weaving (or rather, interleaving) the two phrases into a single seamless-sounding output stream.

It’s not terribly surprising that both of these stock phrases were simultaneously activated in the dean’s mind; in fact, it seems so reasonable and even inevitable that both got activated that a reflective person would have to wonder, “If the dean got tripped up by two parallel analogies being built simultaneously in his brain and bringing the two rival lexical items to mind at once, then how come I myself have often managed to use just
one
of these phrases without getting tripped up by interference from the
other
one?” When you stop to think about it, it’s a little bit like asking, “How come skilled pianists so seldom hit two adjacent notes on the keyboard simultaneously?”

As a matter of fact, beginning pianists
do
make such errors all the time, to their frustration, but gradually they figure out techniques that allow their fingers to plunk themselves down on
just the one note that is needed
, despite the extreme nearness of other notes. This is a kind of small motoric miracle that we will not attempt to explain, but it serves to make readers aware that, quite analogously, there is a small
categoric
miracle going on every time that we come out with an uncorrupted word or phrase. We usually come out with
that word or phrase alone
, pure and uncontaminated, not blended with any of its semantic near-neighbors. But how is it that our “mental fingers” almost never strike two neighboring “notes” at once?

In truth, our mental fingers often
do
strike two notes at once, activating two or more rival categories. As a result, human speech is peppered with all sorts of tiny defects that are lingering traces of the silent battle raging behind the scenes. If one pays very close attention to any native speaker of any language, one will hear slightly deformed vowels, slightly prolonged consonants, voiced consonants that should actually be unvoiced (or vice versa), slight pauses between words, and many other subtle phonetic distortions, all of which are surface manifestations of the seething activity below, rife with interlexical competitions of which the speaker is nearly always totally unaware.

Some observers of the phenomenon of lexical blending have asserted that every blend is necessarily a splicing of
exactly two
contributing lexical items, but as we briefly said earlier, this is an untenable hypothesis. In any large corpus of blends, there will inevitably be cases where three (and at times even four or more) items were involved.

As a matter of fact, in the blend made by our delightfully dizzy dean there is a third stock phrase in English that was most likely involved. That phrase is “We’ll pull no punches”, which, just like “We’ll pull out all the stops” and “We’ll leave no stone unturned”, means that one will tackle the challenge not half-heartedly but with as much ardor as one can muster. Moreover, “We’ll pull no punches” and “We’ll pull no stops
unturned” start out with exactly the same three words, so that “We’ll pull no punches” seems quite likely to have played a role in the process, although on the other hand it’s far more common to say “We won’t pull any punches”, so there is room for doubt.

We turn our attention now to some more blatant cases of triple or even higher-degree blends. In a radio interview, an author was describing San Francisco’s famous City Lights Bookstore during the beatnik era. He said:

That last phrase glides by remarkably smoothly; no one would have any trouble understanding it. The interviewer didn’t snicker and say,
“Turn the other eye
, eh?” But no matter how smooth it sounds, “turn the other eye” is not an English idiom; in fact it makes no sense at all. There are, however, several English idioms that are, in various senses, close to it. One is “look the other way”, another is “turn a blind eye”, and a third is “turn the other cheek”. There is also the shorter idiom “turn away”. We won’t speculate as to how these four idioms might have contributed to the utterance, nor will we claim that we are sure that
exactly
these four lexical items and
no others
contributed.

Indeed, one of the problems with the retrospective analysis of lexical blends (and until there are incredibly sophisticated real-time brain-scanning mechanisms, and until we understand the brain infinitely better, there can only be retrospective analyses based on plausible guesses) is that although sometimes it seems obvious what the contributing phrases had to be, at other times it is highly debatable. We error-makers do not have privileged access to our unconscious mechanisms (they are “under the scenes”!), and we are not necessarily more reliable analysts of our own utterances than outsiders are, so the phrases that we ourselves suggest as being the “culprits” are not necessarily the right ones. In any case, it would be naïve to think that all contributing phrases contribute
to an equal degree.
So what we are faced with is, first, a list of
plausible
contributing phrases, which could include many more than two, and then the thorny (in fact, unanswerable) question as to
how much
each phrase contributed to the final blend (not in the sense of
how many words
it contributed, but in the sense of
how much influence
it wielded).

Here is a lexical blend with an unclear number of ingredients:

What is it the hell he wants, anyway?

Two contributing phrases are clearly “What is it that he wants?” and “What the hell does he want?” But there is also a potential third contributor — “What in the hell does he want?” — and even possibly a fourth — “What in hell does he want?” Although we contend that there is (or at least there was, at the time of the utterance) an actual, scientific fact of the matter as to which of these phrases
did
or
did not
contribute to this error in the brain of the particular speaker, we acknowledge that such questions are completely unapproachable, given today’s level of understanding of the human brain.

Here’s a striking case of multiple influences:

My dad really hit the stack when I got home so late.

What the speaker meant is that her father grew very angry very fast, which is to say, he both
hit the ceiling
and
blew his stack.
Any native speaker of American English will immediately realize that these two expressions were involved behind the scenes, and perhaps will think that that is the whole story. However, that’s very unlikely. Each of these phrases contains roughly half of the final blend, but there is another very common American idiom — namely, “hit the sack” — which
as a whole
sounds almost identical to the expression that was uttered. Even though the meaning of “hit the sack” — “go to bed” — is utterly unrelated to sudden bursts of anger, it is hard to believe that the “phonetic pull” or “sonic attraction” of that standard phrase played no role in this blend. It was like a huge planet gravitationally pulling the speaker towards it.