In Praise of Linguistic Errors

I am absolutely fascinated by the little everyday mistakes in language that people make -- the communication failures that are so revealing of how difficult it is to create intersubjectivity through language. Here are a couple of fun recent ones:

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On a going-away card for an administrator, hand-signed by many members of the department:

"... I will miss you so much. We have defiantly made many memories and shared lots of good stories..."

Defiantly?!

My theory on this (based on several years of informal evidence collection) is roughly as follows: The writer meant to write the word "definitely". However, she, like many others, routinely misspells this as "definately." Electronic spell-check flags this as an incorrect form, but does not flag the similarly spelled "defiantly", so she tends to type that, despite the obvious semantic difference. This error, first made in typing, has transferred to her hand-writing. I'm fairly certain, though I won't be able to test this, that if she read it out loud, she would read it as "definitely" and never notice the difference.

I wish I could ask the subject whether this theory jives with her understanding of how she has come to spell this word. Unfortunately, it's very tricky to talk with people about these sorts of things because (a) they become aware of the mistakes they are making, thus contaminating the data and (b) they think you are making fun of them.

Of course, there's an outside possibility that she did mean to write "defiantly." Maybe that was one heck of a memory-making process.
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Walking along the East Range this morning, I saw a man walking along with a little boy about 4 years old. The boy was earnestly explaining something, gesturing with his hands. The man was very interested in the boy's explanation and was in fact filming it with his phone. (Maybe he was doing research. Kids are such fabulous sources of data for social scientists; I have been mining my little brother and sister for data since they were born. Which is, in my view, not at all incompatible with loving them like crazy.)

As I walked past them, the little boy said ".... and if there's not a key, you just can't get it to open. It's stuck like that."

"Yeah, and so that's how locks work?" said the man.

The little boy sighed. "No," he said with obvious disapproval. "That's how locks don't work."

What we have here is a failure to communicate due to different concepts of what it means for locks to "work." If you think about it, you can really see how both the man's concept and the little boy's concept are plausible. But of course, the little boy's concept and word usage will change as he becomes better able to control the conventionalized semantic valence of the word "work". It would be interesting to keep listening and surreptitiously testing for that usage and see how the concept develops as he ages.