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The psychopathology of every day life is deeply involved with language. Examples of mishearing, misspeaking, misreading, miswriting, misprinting, mistyping and miscounting are encountered by all who care to observe and analyse the facts. As in every faulty act, there are many motives involved and a study of them is deservedly of interest. Playing with sounds is also within universal experience. The problem of oral libidinal discharge which it involves has not yet been sufficiently investigated. It covers a variety of semantic manifestations, including phonetic absurdities, double entendre and double talk, tongue twisters, riddles, anagrams and puns. The whole field is richly tapestried with wit. The essentials of the problems to be presented have been masterfully handled by Freud in The Psyehopathology of Everyday Life. The present study aims less at originality than at a comprehensive covering of the whole field of semantic adventures as they are met with in clinical experience.
One of the best examples of mishearing we owe to The Pirates of Pensance of Gilbert and Sullivan. An old deaf maid apprenticed Frederic to a pirate instead of a pilot.
Deaf people have always been the butt of jokes for auditory misadventures. Three deaf men travel in a train in London. Is this Wembley? - asks one as the train pulls