Oops! How’s That Again?

Oops! How’s That Again?
Roger Rosenblatt
Major theme: To point out the mistakes while speaking, translating and so on.
“Oops! How’s That Again” is an essay written by Rosenblatt and this essay has a humorous tone. Through the humorous tone also, the essayist has tried to reflect the bitter reality of human beings when they make mistake when they speak. He enriches his discussion with remarkable examples; although, as befits its subject. He is much concerned with the psychological causes of bloopers.
Human beings often make mistake knowingly and unknowingly when they speak. After making mistake they also apologize for it. From the uneducated person to highly intellectual and educated, scholar, different mistakes are made according to their level. This essay describes the mistake the people make while speaking and the reasons behind it are divided into four categories. They are as follows: i. Public Blunders ii. Memorable Translations iii. Bloopers iv. Spoonerisms.
Public Blunders are the mistakes made by the people when they give speech. While delivering the speech, they don’t actually care for the grammatical mistakes or vocabulary mistakes. These mistakes are specially committed by especially by the political leaders when they deliver their speech. They try to give emphasis by giving different examples but their sentences are not totally complete. This happens due to their tongue slip. Here the speaker may be trying to give message from one view but the different audience may take it in wrong way.
Memorable translations are the mistakes generally done by the people who speak very fast. This is also related to the psychological condition of the listener. The words spoken by the fast speaker may not be easily understood the real words. There may be misunderstanding between the speaker and listener. The person with weak psychology, if, wrongly interprets the words of the speaker, it may bring violent situation.
Bloopers are the mistakes done foolishly and not tried to correct. These mistakes are very simple types of mistakes, which are not given much importance by the speaker. This may be the habit of some people.
Spoonerisms are the mistakes, which are done by the use of incorrect words due to tongues slips. Here, wrong words are not known by the listener as the speaker immediately tries to replace the wrong word when he comes to know the mistake. While the replacement of words the speaker should be conscious as wrong replacement can misinterpret the actual meaning.
There are different views about the verbal errors according to different people. Victoria Fromkin, a linguist, says that the verbal errors happen due to tongue slips concerned with the brain. Before the words are expressed, thought is placed by the brain into a grammatical framework. Sigmund Freud, a psychiatrist, presents his theory about the verbal error in different way. According to him, a tongue slips are caused by the network of id (unconscious mind), ego (subconscious mind) and superego (conscious mind). When people make mistakes, it has become the trend to laugh at them. Why do we laugh at them we don’t know. According to the philosopher Henri Bergson, the act of laughter is caused by any interruption of normal human fluidity or momentum. So, tongue slips are like slips of banana peels. We simply make fun and hoot at the errors simply to break the monotonies.

Alternatively,

Oops! How’s that again

In this essay the essayist humorously examines our verbal error’s. The essayist illustrates different variety of verbal error’s problems, why they happen and also explains we laugh at them. The writer is mainly concerned with the psychological causes of the verbal miss steps.
The writer begins with numerous examples of verbal errors .He organizes those examples into four groups as Public blunder, Mistranslation, Bloopers, Spoonerism. Public blunder is the first type of verbal errors in which the speaker comments some verbal errors publicly. E.g.: A businessman Peter Belfour wished the happy married life of prince Charles with lady Jane .But the prince was engaged to Lady Diana .Lady Jane was his Ex-Girlfriend. The second group of verbal errors is mistranslation .While translating something from one language to another language .Some wrong translation may occur E.g.: The slogan “Come Alive With Pepsi” failed in German when it was translated as “Come Alive Out of Grave With Pepsi”.
Further the writer talks about Bloopers which are the embracing errors made on Radio and Television by different R.J and V.J .E.g.: The radio announcer Harry Vonzell Tntroduce the president Herbert Hoover as Hoobert Heever. Finaly spoonerism is the transportation of the sound of the word by accident .This type of verbal errors was introduced by William spooner who once chided his student like this: “You have Hissed all my mystery lecture”. Actually he wanted to say “you have missed all my history lecture”. The writer than draws our attentation to the causes of such verbal errors. According to him such mistake are funny but linguist and psychologist think them as important verbal errors and psychological behavior .A linguist Victoria framkin psychoanalyst says that such slips of tongue are clues to show how our brain stores and articulates language. The Psychoanalyst, Sigmmd Freud explained such error’s (Verbal errors) as the expression of the speaker inner thoughts.
Writer examine why we laugh at such verbal errors. According to him at such mistake we laugh because they are new and delightful to us. According to the Philosopher Henri Bergson people laugh if there is a break in normal action of everyday monotonous life. The slips of the tongue breaks the everybody sameness and monotones. According to essayist we delightfully laugh at the slips of tongue because they are revelation of the speaker in her desires.
We laugh at the charitable wish very kindly and not harshly .We kindly laugh when some nice inner wishes or rival through the verbal errors eg: when Geraldford said in the 1976 President debate that Poland was not under the soviet domination .It was the expression of charitable wish. In this way througout the essay the writer examines our verbal behaviors in a very delightful tone. Acc to him such verbal missteps shows as a new world of logic and possibility.