Sweeping rakes

Listening to the news on the radio during my drive into the city this morning, I heard the weather reporter say this, "Looking out the window, I saw my neighbor sweeping rakes".

Without missing a beat, she made an instantaneous auto-correction:  "raking leaves".

What struck me powerfully is that grammar outweighed lexicon.  The grammar was fixed, while the vocabulary had to be altered to fit the right part of speech.  Her language wires got switched, a neuron misfired, but in a nanosecond, without even thinking or explaining, she produced the intended sentence.

 

Selected readings

• "The phenomenology of error" (1/11/09)
• "Even more Phenomenology of Error" (1/11/09)

The weather reporter's error is of a different category than the type discussed in the above two posts, but exactly what kind it is needs to be discussed.