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I have suggested elsewhere that the concept of paraphasia should be widened to include a group of speech deviations which are commonly ignored.1 The speech with which that paper was concerned included word repetitions, tautology, grammatical slips which involved illogicalities (e.g., a plural noun and a singular pronoun and a switch in gender), use of pretentious or out-of-character words, uncompleted sentences, contradictions and hesitatory formulas such as 'I don't think', 'I don't know', 'Not that I know of', 'I mean', and 'Well'. It is suggested here that a number of additional acts should be classed as paraphasic.
Among well-known hesitatory interjections are 'er', 'ah', 'ha', and 'um', and combinations of these. There is little semantic difference between these interjections and 'well' as used in, 'Well, I'm not quite sure'. The cognitive content of the sentence is unchanged, for example, if the version runs, 'Ah, I'm not quite sure'. The superficial difference lies in the fact that 'well' has certain reasonably clear connotations as a noun and adverb (and is also used occasionally as an adjective and a verb), whereas 'ah' has no definite meaning. Once 'well' is used in contexts where it is interchangeable with 'ah', its cognitive content vanishes almost completely. It becomes an emotive verbal act, like any other interjection, and, as such, represents a disturbance in an otherwise meaningful context.
Since psychoanalysis is persuaded that such disturbances in the stream of speech are psychically determined, the occurrence of these minor hesitatory acts becomes scarcely less interesting than more obvious speech blunders. They must have some cause. They must serve some purpose. Freud's classic study of speech blunders in the Psychopathology of Everyday