Actual Science Behind the Unintended Pun

My somewhat scientific bent led me to want to add a somewhat scientific bent to these musings. So I googled “Freudian slip unintended pun,” which led me to an abstract of an article entitled The Production of Verbal Slips and Double Entendres as Clues to the Efficiency of Normal Speech Production, by Dr. Michael Motley of UC Davis. I had added “Freudian slip” to the search, because

1. "Unintended Pun" on its own was returning mostly people reporting their own puns (which of course helps prove the subtitle of this blog), but didn’t get me any scientific information.
2. My daughter Claire, a regular contributor to these pages, had noted that in one of her college classes, she was studying Freudian slips, or parapraxis, which seemed somewhat like Unintended Puns.
   

I figured adding a more “science-y” term might yield more science-y results. And lo, Dr. Motley's article was the primary result.

Click here for the abstract of Dr. Motley's article.

It’s probably a good thing that I only found the abstract, since the full article would most likely be well beyond my understanding. But it did lead me to Dr. Motley. I e-mailed him, who kindly replied, pointing me to two articles he wrote for popular consumption. I could not find links to these articles, but they would be available at most large public libraries, and would make great reading for those of us interested in how “slips” and Unintended Puns lurk just behind so much of what we say.

Here are references to the two articles:

• 1985 Motley, M.T. Slips of the tongue. Scientific American. 253:116-126.
• 1987 Motley, M.T. What I meant to say. Psychology Today 21(2):24-28.
  

Claire found the 1987 article and sent me a copy. Dr. Motley describes a theory known as “spreading activation,” in which

“a person’s lexicon, or mental dictionary, is organized so that each word in it is interconnected with other words associated by meaning, sound or grammar—somewhat like the interconnection of point in a complex spider web. When we prepare to speak, the relevant parts of the web are activated, causing reverberation within the system. Activation spreads first to the most closely related words, then to words associated with them, and so on. Each word activates an alternate part through the web. The cumulative activation for each word is tallied by checking how often each ‘point’ in the web ‘vibrates,’ and the word with the highest accumulation activation (the most vibration, in our web analogy) is selected. Verbal slips would be explained as the result of competing choices that have equal or nearly equal activation levels.”

This sounds so much like how I’ve attempted to explain what I’ve called my Unintended Pun theory—the brain being organized in such a way that words, metaphors, word pictures, and similar-sounding words come tumbling out when we least expect them, creating a combination of words that we don’t mean to come out, but that nonetheless do come out. Thank you, Dr. Motley, for doing this research.

Pun for the road: This one's a little subtle, but you movie buffs will get it.

August 19, 1991
After learning that George Lucas had just contracted to do three more Star Wars movies, a friend said: “He's the driving force behind those movies.”