A Slip of the Tongue

I hardly think Freud comes into it at all 99 times out of 10...

Here are some terms you can use when your friends make a linguistic gaffe that will make them feel extra stupid.

Malapropism: the term itself comes from French, meaning inappropriate. Nothing innately risque about this one though; it's just what happens when two similar-sounding words are confused: they sat at the table and enjoyed an evening's riposte.  People who are trying to use bigger words than are good for them do this a lot.  Also nerds like me; Snorlax and Snorkack was an especially awkward blunder from the other day.

Spoonerism: named for Willliam Archibald Spooner, an Oxford don, these are the punny ones where bits of words get switched around within a phrase: George Carlin's don't sweat petty things and don't pet sweaty things.  I'm wondering if one of my favorite lines from Arrested Development counts (it's as Ann as the nose on plain's face), but I'm not sure about that one...it doesn't really involve metathesis.  A side note - apparently if you're in Poland, these are known as Marrowsky, after a verbally-confused count.

Mondegreen: a misheard lyric due to homophony.  The term was coined by Silvia Wright, who as a child misheard they had slain the Earl of Moray / and laid him on the green as ...Lady Mondegreen, but there are other (better) ones, such as the immortal 'scuse me while I kiss this guy (Jimi Hendrix is many things, but Wikipedia doesn't mention any relationships with other dudes).

Eggcorn: this is where a word is mistook for a similar one.  I'm not sure how this differs from mondegreens, actually - perhaps it extends beyond songs?  Anyway, eggcorn is an example of an eggcorn (it's really acorn)...a more common example might be duck tape.

They get less and less official sounding you go down, don't they...

One last note: watch out for oronyms, as they confound the listener more than the speaker.  This is where two meanings exist in the phonetics of one phrase, as in the stuff he knows can lead to problems / the stuffy nose can lead to problems.  Different, of course, from what happens to Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice's against my will, I am sent to bid you come into dinner throws him into a state of (semantic) confusion, but that may just be the brilliance of Shakespeare.