And now we have a statement of questionable objectivity by Biden to ponder, “By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president.” I thought the Hair Sniffer in Chief was a man, a white male, biologically equipped to inappropriately take showers with his daughter (her words, not mine). But now from his own mouth Joe Biden has declared himself to be a black woman. Objectivity is dead.
All right, I know it was just another Biden gaffe, but the Gaffe Master still never fails to surprise me. Could he just avoid speaking off the cuff to save his followers the need for cleanups? It’s bad enough when he reads instructions for prepared text on the teleprompter, as he did when he said “pause.”
Everyone Misspeaks, but
If I look back on my own verbal slips and falls, I see that in every instance I was trying to speak rapidly or was engaged in a complex thought. Or, alternatively, I muffed a word in the midst of making a point in a discussion with someone adamant in supporting an opposing view; basically, I allowed adrenaline to control my speech. I spoke from the limbic system rather than from the frontal cortex. Of course, I’m also guilty of an occasional parapraxis, but the subconscious mind has or is a mind of its own. As in the speech of most people the verbal slips are noticeable by their rarity and are often followed by a correction. With Biden, they are noticeable by their frequency and go uncorrected.
Scarborough’s political blindness (deafness) aside, the rest of the world has noticed or heard. Still, why The Times of India cares about Biden’s gaffes puzzles me, but it ran an article under the headline “Biden made 148 gaffes in public comments.”* The paper reports that the gaffes occurred between January 1 and April 24 this year with Biden also tripping over his words 118 times in speeches and comments during the same period. His numerous gaffes and speech errors have also inspired a book by KeWe Workshop Publishing (Author) entitled LET'S GET READY TO MUMBLLLLE!!!: Joe Biden Gaffes & Bidenisms. Activity Book for Adults. 50 hilarious pages of Biden’s best blunders, gaffes, and mishaps. **
I’m not sure what to call Joe Biden’s many gaffes and word fails. Is it mental ankyloglossia? Speech errors start in the brain obviously, and they manifest themselves in many forms. Joe seems to have mastered all of them. It’s as though he lacks the ability to monitor some pre-articulatory representation of the target word or phrase before he says it. Somewhere between brain and tongue there’s a detour or very long traffic jam, if not a “Road Closed” sign. When he recovers, it’s typically with “Look” or “Here’s the deal” though neither of those ensures a return to intelligibility as exemplified by his statement in the debate that “We beat Medicare.”
According to Kevin Trewartha and Natalie A Phillips, there are at least eight types of speech error that can interrupt articulation: 1) Omission, 2) Addition, 3) Sequential substitution, 4) Non-sequential substitution, 5) Non-substitution, 6) Non-identification, 7) Fluency, 8) Combinations of errors, and 8) Error correction. *** When he said, “America can be defined by one word, Iwuzindfutmhmafut,” he was probably mouthing a Non-sequential substitution (#4), but he’s probably committed each type of speech errors.
I won’t bore you by listing many examples, but I realize you now crave examples of the eight error types. To satisfy that craving, see the article by Trewartha and Phillips. As for Biden’s speech errors, they have been preserved online and in print.
*TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Apr 30, 2024, 21:56 IST Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/109735507.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
**June 28, 2021
***Trewartha KM, Phillips NA. Detecting self-produced speech errors before and after articulation: an ERP investigation. Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Nov 11;7:763. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00763. PMID: 24273506; PMCID: PMC3822290. Online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3822290/