The Osama/Obama mix-up

The Atlantic’s Rebecca Greenfield asked U. of Penn linguistics professor Mark Liberman why the names Osama and Obama are so frequently mixed up, and how it goes beyond just the switch of B and S*:

The syntactic category rule means that when two words are confused for one another the “target” (the word replaced) and the substituting word are almost always of the same syntactic category. In normal speak: nouns replace nouns, verbs replace verbs, and so on. If “Obama” were a verb instead of a noun (as in, the Democrats are going to Obama the GOP in 2012), we would be substantially less likely to confuse it with the noun “Osama.”

Of course the gaffe doesn’t just happen because both words are of the same part of speech. The speaker is also subject to what linguists call “priming.” Your brain makes certain words more accessible to your tongue when they resemble–in pronunciation, in meaning, in subject matter–words that you frequently hear. “Priming means that when you’ve been reading/hearing/thinking about hospitals, words like ‘doctor’ and ‘nurse’ will be recognized more quickly, and are also more likely to be substituted in a slip of the tongue,” Liberman explains. So hearing Osama and Obama in the same context makes your brain more apt to use them interchangeably in speech. “Normally this is a good thing for communication,” Liberman adds, “because it takes less effort to think of primed words.”

Unless, of course, you’re just a racist. A bad racist, really, because you don’t realize that not all Muslims are Arabs.

* Zing! See what I did there?

** Categorized as “Science” because, apparently, some people think linguistics is science.

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