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Freudian slip
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Freudian slip

speech error

Learn about this topic in these articles:

definition

  • Sigmund Freud
    In Sigmund Freud: Further theoretical development

    …or pen (later colloquially called Freudian slips), misreadings, or forgetting of names. These errors Freud understood to have symptomatic and thus interpretable importance. But unlike dreams they need not betray a repressed infantile wish yet can arise from more immediate hostile, jealous, or egoistic causes.

    Read More
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spoonerism
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spoonerism

rhetoric
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spoonerism, reversal of the initial letters or syllables of two or more words, such as “I have a half-warmed fish in my mind” (for “half-formed wish”) and “a blushing crow” (for “a crushing blow”). The word was derived from the name of William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), a distinguished Anglican clergyman and warden of New College, Oxford, a nervous man who committed many “spoonerisms.” Such transpositions are sometimes made intentionally to produce comic effect.

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