Some recent Freudian slippers

I churn out thousands of words a day as part of my job, so it's only natural that I should make a few slip ups. It's amazing how easy it is to slip into saying something quite different by the addition of one or two letters - note how 'appealing', if you change two letters, becomes 'appalling'. Even the most innocuous of words is prone to disaster. Thus yesterday, while typing -

quite

I repeatedly made an accidental slip, omitting the e, causing me to type

quit

Because the transcripts I work with are often about slightly dull but worthwhile subjects like plumbing and roads, I wasn't too surprised to be finding myself working away on a transcript about dams. Or, in the uncommon parlance,

weirs

Here, I continually slipped up and started typing

weirds

I think I weeded out all the 'weirds' in the end, but you can't be sure; these are the sort of thing a spell check will not weed out, and the human eye may just glance over them. But then, maybe there is just something infernal about the whole subject of human-made bodies of water, anyway. Add one letter to 'dam', and you get 'damn'. Coincidence? I think not! (Oh, all right then, it probably is.)

And then, there was a transcript with a former Army member who kept on using the word

jointery

Jointery, I should explain, is an innovation in defence circles. It doesn't appear to have made it into the dictionaries yet, but it means something like 'Joint operations', but there's a formal definition here, and a slightly less formal definition here. The spell check at work didn't recognise it either. It kept on thinking the word was

joinery

Which probably wouldn't have made a lot of sense in that transcript.

Of course, it's not too often that you come across a real zinger, a blooper that you'd love to have made. I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it before, but it was a modern transcript of an old ABC news reel about the flooding of the inimitable Adaminaby. (The whole population of the town was effectively moved so they didn't go down with the houses.) Where the original newsreader said,

And these are the men who are drowning Adaminaby...

The final transcript reads

And these are the men who are drowning admirably...

I guess it's just another case of those damned dams. So maybe I should just quit? Quite.