Slip of the Tongue

Somewhere on the Web--home to every conceivable typographic error--I ran across the name of a Pink Floyd album rendered as "A Momentary Laps of Reason". If you care to Google that phrase, you'll find it repeated quite a few times, too many for my taste.

So are "laps" as in "laps of a racetrack" and "lapse" related? You'd think they might be, if you twist them around in your head enough; I did. But they're not. A lap of a racetrack is related to the "-lap" of "overlap"; that is to say, something that extends past and overlays something else. This sense of "lap" comes from the word "lappet", which is a decorative flap of some sort, whether on clothing or on an animal. (And "flap" isn't related to "lap" or "lappet"; "flap", originally "flappe", is an onomatopoeia that means "slap", which is itself onomatopoeic.) The "-lap" of "lapse" (and also "elapse") is from the Latin "labi", "to slip", "to lapse"; when something lapses, it slips, possibly in a moral sense (Middle English "lapsen" meant "to deviate from the norm"), and when something elapses, it slips away.

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I wrote a while back about the glottal stop in double-"-t-" words such as "mutton" and "spittle", and made a passing mention of its polar opposite, replacing that "-t-" sound with a "-d-", relatively common in North America. I don't care for it, but it's a logical enough progression from a physical point of view: the tongue position for both sounds is nearly identical (as I wrote about here; they're both dental sounds), and the "-d" sound takes a little less energy to produce, so it makes sense that it would gradually come to supersede the more difficult sound.

But here's a headline that demonstrates what happens when people trust their ears and not their eyes, and when there are no editors and not even anybody who takes the time to use a spell-checker:

Grampa needs talking to about studdering

See, the problem here is threefold. First, in a newspaper, the person who writes the headlines is hardly ever the person who wrote the original story; in the piece itself--it's a medical advice column in the Sunday, August 21st, edition of the Halifax Daily News--the word "stuttering" is spelled correctly. Second, whoever wrote the headline pronounces the word with that "-d-" and obviously doesn't have any idea how "stutter" is meant to be spelled. ("Studder" is not a variant; it's just wrong.) And third, no damned editors and nobody who uses a spell-checker.

In fairness to that third bit, editors don't usually look at headlines. But there used to be proofreaders if not copy-editors who did look over the entire page, headlines and all; at least, there were when I worked at that selfsame Daily News. Nobody seems to employ them any more, and the world is the poorer for it.