Freud's 1910 “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” initiated psychobiography. It also brought him derision because he had read Leonardo's “childhood memory” in a German translation where Leonardo's term un nibbio (a hawk) had been translated as das Geier (a vulture). Because Freud's interpretation of Leonardo's sexuality depended almost entirely on the bird being a vulture, he came up against severe criticism that persists still today. By the mid-1950s his “error” had become known as “Freud's slip.” This essay exposes that, had Freud used the correct bird, nibbio as hawk, he might well have arrived at the same conclusions, and that his critics had themselves made lexical errors. It also argues that no evidence whatsoever supports Freud's assertion of Leonardo's homosexuality, while concluding that Freud himself suppressed a classification of vulture (Gyps fulvuslder Gänsegeier) that may have led him to a different conclusion.