Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (65 page)

In this lexical blend and in all others, the phrases that contribute are summoned up out of their dormant state either because of some kind of
conceptual proximity
to an appropriate concept, or because of
phonetic proximity
to some lexical item (frequently the nascent blend itself). And either kind of proximity means that an unconscious analogy has been made. To crudely summarize this particular unconscious mental process in just a few words, once the erroneous hybrid phrase had been assembled (by splicing together the fruits of two rival
semantic
analogies), it “sounded right” because of its phonetic similarity to a very familiar phrase (
i.e.
, thanks to a
phonetic
analogy), hence it became more alluring, and this gave it a big boost towards getting uttered.

The following amusing phrase escaped from the lips of a distinguished professor of cognitive science as he was paying gracious tribute to an administrative assistant who was stepping down after many years of service:

She’ll be hard shoes to fill!

To the perplexed listener who quickly captured it for posterity in his little notebook, this sentence sounded so extremely strange (indeed, on the verge of incomprehensibility for a moment or two) that he was astounded to see that no one in the assembled crowd of cognitive scientists was smiling, chuckling, or writing it down. How could such a weird, garbled phrase go unnoticed by scores of people whose profession is the study of the mysteries of language and cognition? And yet it did.

The contributing phrases in this case clearly include the two idioms “She’ll be a hard act to follow” and “It’ll be hard to fill her shoes”, but it’s also likely that the simpler phrase “She’ll be hard to replace” played a role here, since, like the blend itself, it uses the words “She’ll be hard”, without the indefinite article “a”.

We conclude this section by looking at a blend that strikes us as having even a larger number of plausible contributors than the blends we have discussed so far:

Things are looking glimmer and glimmer these days.

It’s almost certain that at least two of the adjectives “glummer”, “gloomier”, and “grimmer” were involved in the behind-the-scenes story of this very pessimistic blend. Each of them bears a unique and strong phonetic resemblance to the nonexistent adjective “glimmer”. It’s also possible that one or both of the adjectives “slimmer” and “dimmer” might have played a role. And finally and most intriguingly, there is the standard phrase “a glimmer of hope”, containing the very word “glimmer” that appears inside the blend. Curiously, though, inside “a glimmer of hope”, the word “glimmer” is a
noun
, whereas inside the blend it is an invented
adjective.
Although the meaning of “a glimmer of hope” is cautiously optimistic, it’s a phrase that tends to be uttered only when a very worrisome situation is being described, so it’s a close cousin of the overall pessimistic feeling that lay behind the blend.

We hasten to add that not all six of these plausible contributors were immediately obvious to us. It took us much rumination to come up with them, but once we had done so, every one of them struck us as quite plausible, four of them even being very strong candidates. So here we seem to have six different potential ingredients, and yet it’s impossible to know which of them were actually involved, and how deeply, and in what ways. And of course there could be yet other words or phrases that played a contributing role but that we didn’t think of. All in all, then, the question of what
really
took place behind the scenes in a particular lexical blend is, as this example shows, fantastically slippery. All we can do is make educated guesses.

Most of the blends that we’ve looked at so far involve phrases made up of several words, but blending can also take place on a smaller scale, using exclusively short words. The resulting blends pass by extremely fast, however, which makes them even less likely to be heard. For instance:

Our book is maistly about analogy-making.

This oddity, featuring an obvious blend of the two rival adverbs “mainly” and “mostly”, has been heard many times since it was first added to our collection. When seen in print, it stands out like a sore thumb, but in the flow of very rapid speech, it often sails by completely unheard.

Another simple but subtle one-word blend is the following:

I don’t want to dwelve into it.

In this case, the participating phrases were “to dwell on it” and “to delve into it”. Both “dwell” and “delve” are fairly unusual words. Daring to use a word at the fringes of one’s vocabulary is a bit like making a long, risky leap to hit a note near either end of the keyboard; obviously the chances of hitting two neighboring notes at once go up greatly when one lunges at a target that is far from one’s most familiar territory.

And yet sometimes very high-frequency words are blended as well, as the following case shows. The phone rang and Danny’s father picked it up. “Is Danny there?” asked a young voice. The father heard himself reply:

I’m not sure — I’ll go seck.

Being an ardent error-collector, he instantly jotted down his own error with glee, at first thinking it was just a cute amalgam of two one-syllable words — namely, “see” and “check”. It occurred to him to wonder why he hadn’t combined them in the reverse fashion (“I’ll go chee”), but then he realized that there was a third component playing a key role behind the scenes — namely, the very common phrase “Just a sec!”, which had certainly been one of his thoughts as he put the phone down, even if he didn’t utter it. If there had been any competition between “I’ll go chee” and “I’ll go seck”, this extra hidden phonetic factor would have easily tipped the balance in favor of “I’ll go seck.”

Here’s another blend of single words, one that we’ve heard many a time, and once again, it tends to go by so fast and to sound so natural that it’s easy to miss:

Why, shurtainly!

A fight between “Sure!” and “Certainly!” is shurtainly what lurks behind the scenes.

Herewith follows a small pot-pourri of lexical blends at the single-word level:

Lexical blending sometimes results in one’s saying the exact opposite of the idea that one intends to convey. For instance, when the fan belt in a certain woman’s brand-new car suddenly snapped, she frustratedly commented, “I don’t think those things just break for no reason at all!” Her husband, who concurred and wanted to lend her moral support, replied:

I don’t agree!

inadvertently blending “I agree” and “I don’t think so either”, so that his remark came out 180 degrees opposite to his intention.

A professor had been invited to submit an article to an anthology and was glad to accept but he had no time to write anything new. Luckily, he remembered a piece he had written some years earlier but never published. However, on rereading his old piece, he saw that it was not very much on the topic, so he reluctantly had to abandon that avenue. Then a colleague suggested to him that he use a different unpublished manuscript, and he was very enthusiastic about that idea. But when he looked up this second old manuscript, he discovered, to his shock, that it, too, was very far from the topic — in fact, considerably more so than the article he’d already given up on. In frustration, he commented, strongly stressing the two words in italics:

Unfortunately,
this
article’s even
less
irrelevant than the first one was!

Unwittingly, he had combined “even more irrelevant” with “even less relevant” and in so doing he came out with a statement diametrically opposed to what he was thinking.

A certain kind of blend involves two (or more) different
thoughts
that occur to the speaker at the same time. We will refer to such a blend as a “biplan”, since it seems to blend two different plans for the utterance. A biplan is different from the lexical blends described in earlier sections in that the analogical link between the two rival items is more abstract, and for that reason the blended ideas seem further apart.

A typical example of this phenomenon took place when Francisco exclaimed:

It sure is thirsty!

He was simultaneously thinking the thought “It sure is hot!” and also the thought “I sure am thirsty!”, and he telescoped the two thoughts into one short sentence, which, though compact, made no sense. Being hot and being thirsty are two quite distinct physical discomforts, and
it’s hot
situations and
I’m thirsty
situations have less overlap than do most of the blended situations that we’ve covered in the past few pages.

Nonetheless, both types of situation involve a core essence of
physical discomfort wanting to be remedied
, and it was to an analogy residing at this rather high level of abstraction that Francisco’s blend was due.

Among the biplans in our collection are the following ones:

In several of these it’s apparent that there are rival grammatical plans that are duking it out behind the scenes. In the final one, the two rival plans involve a competition between the thoughts “it weighs a lot” and “it’s worth a lot of money”.

Here is a biplan that took place in Italian but that is simple to understand whatever one’s native language is. Alberto was speaking on the phone with a friend, and the conversation was winding down. Trying to finish up in a courteous fashion, he said:

Grao!

When he heard this nonsense word come out of his mouth, he was quite embarrassed by it. It was the awkward result of an attempt to say “grazie” (“thanks”) and “ciao” at the same time, so he rapidly tried to save face by trying once more, intending to say just one of them. Unfortunately, though, he hadn’t quite made up his mind which of the two rival thoughts he really wanted to express, and so the second time what came out of his mouth was again wrong, though somewhat less wrong. It was this:

Giao!

which was nearly “ciao” except that the initial consonant sounded like an English “j” instead of English’s “ch” sound. What had happened was that a tiny residue of the initial voiced consonant cluster “gr” of “grazie” remained inside the new word’s initial consonant, altering the intended unvoiced “ch” sound by voicing it. This is a good example of how two components in a blend can contribute to it to different degrees, “ciao” clearly having had the upper hand, but “grazie” not letting itself be shut out entirely. Here again we see a blend brought about through an abstract analogy — namely, the analogy between
grazie
situations and
ciao
situations, which are both centered on the speaker’s intention to conclude a conversation politely.