So I’m in bed last night, reading a little bit (as is customary) before shutting out the light. I finish one article and move to the next. The title of this new article is “Sleeping with the Enemy”; and the subtitle, “What happened between the Netherlands and us?”
The Netherlands? I wonder. An enemy? Are we having problems with the Dutch which I have somehow overlooked?
So I start to read the article. It opens like this:
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, is a large, mostly glass building shaped a bit like a banana. The institute sits at the southern edge of the city, in a neighborhood that still very much bears the stamp of its East German past.
Suddenly the needle in my reading mind jumps the groove: squwrawk! I think to myself, Wait, why does this start out by telling me about a building in the former East Germany? Then I back up to the very first words and add: …and what the hell, an institute for evolutionary anthropology?!? What’s that got to do with geopolitics?
Then I back up even further, to the New Yorker‘s category heading: annals of evolution, it says.
So that solves the mystery of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But now I’m even more confused. Did we evolve from the Dutch? Say what—?!?
You’ve probably caught on by now, haven’t you? (Thereby compounding my embarrassment.) The word wasn’t Netherlands. The word was Neanderthals.
This sort of thing has happened to me before. I’ll be in the kitchen making a sandwich, say, and a weird or alarming phrase will pop vividly into my mind — so vividly that I can actually see it, which makes me realize that I actually read it just a moment ago, in a headline in the newspaper over here on the other counter, on my way to the pantry. I go to the paper and discover my error, but by then I’m hooked; I’ve got to read at least the opening of the article.
(And the Web? Sheesh. Bad enough as it is. But for someone so easily distracted by half-glimpsed language, the presence of half-glimpsed links is time-sink disaster waiting to happen.)
Netherlands, vs. Neanderthals. There must be a word for this sort of confusion. It seems related to Freudian slips. It also resembles the phenomenon of misheard song lyrics — so-called mondegreens, like “Round John Virgin” for “’round yon virgin” and “Crimea River” for “Cry me a river.” And I can’t be the only one it happens to.
We need a word for it, though.
Nominees? The best I’ve come up with so far would be used in a sentence something like this: I saw a great Dutch caveman the other day…
marta says
I tend to mix pieces of words together to make another word. Meaning, my eye will take have a word on the first line and pair it with half a word on another line and I think I’ve seen a word I’m interested in. But when I read the paragraph, I can’t find the word I thought I saw. Then I go back and figure out what syllable combo my brain picked up.
Funny, how the not-really-there word tends to be related to something on my mind.
And song lyrics…there is one song I keep thinking they’re singing, “Roses in the hall” but they’re actually singing, “Groove is in the heart.”
There are more, but the one example will suffice.
whaddayamean says
oh god. i had a really embarrassing one of these happen at work today (i portmanteau-ed the name of a photo supplier with a particular piece of human anatomy). but it’s too bad for me to post on the internet. all my co-workers got a really good laugh out of it, though.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
Well we are talking “New Yorker” here…and there is that whole “Neiuw Amsterdam” thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam), so evolutionarally speaking…
Jayne says
Dyslegere? I’m making that up, but now I want to Google it. Thank you for reminding me that I am normal. Or as abnormal as the next person. Or you. Or most of us. Or maybe I am just not alone, but not so normal at all. ;)
John says
marta: That’s pretty much my usual pattern of mental misfirings, too.
It’s interesting that when I’m actually reading, my field of vision potentially flooded with words, it happens less often than when I’m doing something else (like puttering). But a similar thing does happen when reading: I’ll be zipping along at a good clip through a passage and suddenly come to a screeching halt. Now hold on just one damn minute — WHAT did I just read?! It’s not that my mind isn’t actually remembering what I’ve read; it’s that what I’ve read suddenly, an instant later, makes no sense at all. Only when backing up and re-reading a few sentences do I realize I’d (say) seen one word or common phrase in place of another.
(Sometimes this happens when I’m reading something I’ve written. Which both gratifies me and p!sses me off, ha.)
John says
whaddayamean: Way to leave us in suspense. I should be embarrassed to admit how much time I’ve spent coming up with possible misfiring associations between photography and anatomy.
John says
brudder: Well, there ya go.
One of the beauties of Wikipedia is that if you browse through it enough, following links and/or just showing random pages, you can eventually connect almost anything. It’s like the number 42. Or the Kevin Bacon of information.
(That article on New Amsterdam you linked to provided one interesting, formerly unknown (to me) tidbit: speaking of the Dutch, “They were spread out to Verhulsten Island (Burlington Island) in the South River (now the Delaware River).” This was apparently in the early 1600s. Luckily, I’m revising Seems to Fit, which includes a short history of the area but only goes back to the mid-1700s.)
John says
Jayne, something like dyslegere is a brilliant suggestion. I tried to use Google’s look-ahead feature on it just now but came up empty-handed. (Well, I tried dyslegeria — modeled on dyslexia.) It seemed to think I was interested in a song called De Le Gera. (In Punjabi? by a performer named Balvir Boparai?)
However, it also led me to a Wikipedia article on delegering. Not in the English, but in the SWEDISH Wikipedia. Google’s Translate feature helps out: delegering literally translates as devolution.
This is devolution in the a legal sense, synonymous with delegation (of authority). But of course I didn’t get that sense right away. All I could think of at first was movement down the evolutionary latter. (We are not men; we are…) So, by way of my misreading something about evolution, you came up with a word for “misreading” which brought us to the opposite of evolution.
The mind swims. Or, well, it splashes, flailing in vain.
And clearly neither of us is alone! :)
Jayne says
@John – Oh the tangents… I could follow them all day! You know, of course, I’m going to look up De Le Gera.
After coming up from under all the back-to-school paperwork I finally looked up dyslegere. It turns out I’m not the only one to think of the term. Someone used it on a UK Keratoconus support group chat board. Whenever I think I’ve thought something entirely original, I am inevitably proven wrong. Darn.