After Chris Matthews again made the now decidedly unfunny gaffe confusing Obama with Osama, I thought it a good time to remind us all that these kinds of slips of the tongue are really much easier to make than you might think.
Take for example the words "silly" and "billy." How many times have you wanted to say to your child or a friend, "You're so silly" and out comes "You're so billy"? And how much worse is that when your child/friend is actually named Billy! There's also the almost unavoidable juxtapositions of "lime" and "slime," "stork" and "pork" (recall McCain's complaints about "storkbarrel spending"), and so on.
And we should not be so parochial to think that we are the only ones who have this problem. Remember when French pundits kept saying "Nous devrions bombarder Chiraq" when they really meant to say "Irak"!?!
These people have so many words to say in a single day, and so many letters to parse through when they're putting those words in order and readying to say them out loud, that it's no wonder they confuse "Obama" and "Osama" as often as they do. And I'll bet nobody screams bloody murder when the media confuse "McCain" with "McBain."
Technical note: a "spoonerism" is defined as the switching if the initial consonants in a pair of words. My question to the linguists is this: do the "S" in Osama and the "B" in Obama count as "initial consonants"? Is this gaffe a "spoonerism"? If not, what is it called?