JLNobody wrote:Bernie, I must agree that most often Freudian Slips pertain to sexual matters, but I don't think it is necessarily so. More generally the slip refers to unconscious material that has burst into the conscious realm of verbal behavior.
But I do suspect that McCain's slips ARE sexual in a way: he's surely out to screw the country, as was Bush.
You just wanted to crack that classic joke, didn't you? Woody used it in Annie Hall, of course but I'll bet it has vaudeville (or earlier) origins.
Slips of the tongue such as rox points to also commonly result from a temporary confusion or indecision on which of several synomyms the mind casts up to fill a role in a sentence we are trying to formulate/complete. My speech has this one occur frequently. A variant of that sort of confusion occurs where (as in the one case with McCain where he referred to himself as a liberal republican) one is trying to run through a sequence of memorized sentences and messes up by getting some element in the sequence out of place.
Though my wife would probably argue, I really doubt either of those examples would have diagnostic value of any sort.
