Since I am hunting Latin and Greek classics, and since booksellers often misspell titles (or leave the author’s name in the genitive case), many excellent purchases can be made at the expense of a seller’s lapsus digiti.
We remember an instance of a little girl who had picked up the phrase “good-night” from the elder pupils, spelling each letter on her fingers, using it as they did, when bidding adieu to the teacher who conducted evening prayers; but she showed her misapprehension of its exact meaning, by saying “good-night” to her teacher after morning school. It was no mere lapsus digitorum, for having not yet been taught the names of the divisions of time, she had confounded the particular term “good-night,” with the general one “good-bye.”.
As he said this, you can imagine our surprise; we thought the man must be out of his head, or that it was a lapsus linguae: yet the strength of his convictions caused us to persist in our first opinion. ”.
Any model of this process which considers the phonemic segment as the basic “spark” or “queach” (ie, speech quark) cannot account for the kinds of lapsūs linguae which occur.