I mentioned the term “word salad” before on this blog, and said that I often have a slip of the tongue when I’m yakking away a mile a minute. I first heard my sister use this term and it has really stayed with me, mostly because I am so guilty of it. But I’m also guilty of typing too fast for my brain, which results in a similar condition to word salad. I like to call it “fast typing word salad.” You might have a better name for it, and if you do I hope you’ll share it with me.

Typing too fast for your brain simply means you are typing at a different speed than you are thinking. So when you mean to say one thing, you say a similar word instead. Or perhaps you skip a word altogether. I am guilty of it on this blog especially. When I’m writing for clients, I go over my writing with a fine tooth comb. Here? I try…. but it isn’t the same.

I know you all have seen some of my slip ups. I thought I’d share some recent ones that really made me look like an idiot. Sadly, I’m not making these up:

• In an email, I wanted to tell my sister that I was doing some prayer and meditation in the mornings, which really seemed to center me. I typed my message, hit send, and a couple minutes later got this message from my sister, “Hahahaha!  You are such a blessing to me!  You make me laugh.  Look at what you wrote.”

  When I re-read my words what I had actually said was “prayer and medication.”  Yeah, I suppose that would center me, too.

Recently on Angela England’s fabulous blog she talked about the importance of hub pages.  I left a comment on that, asking about “hug” pages, not hub pages.  To clarify, this is a hubpage type of article, this is an article on Hubpages, and this is a hub page on a blog.  Clicking these links will give you information but you will not get a hug.
• In an email (again, email!) to my friend Michelle I was yakking about eating too much during dinner and meant to say I “ate like a pig” when instead I wrote “hate like a pig.” To which Michelle asked me why I had to hate on the pigs like that! What do I have against the pig? (I should answer that…. I really don’t have anything against the pig. He has, perhaps, a bit too much fat on him. Then again, don’t we all?)

The moral of this story? Proofread, people. Especially if you’re a fast typer. Proofread.

Have you heard the term “word salad” before? I’d never heard it until a few months ago, when my sister was talking so fast she jumbled a whole bunch of words together, then said she was having word salad. Of course I, wordsmith that I am, had never heard of the term.

In looking it up on the uber reliable Internet, I saw that the term was everywhere. On the oft-referenced Wikipedia, for example. In clicking that helpful link I saw that Word Salad is the name of a poetry magazine (music to my ears!) that “has been in publication since 1995″ and “was founded by poets Bruce Whealton and Lynn Krupey.” Good to know.

Word Salad became a debut album in 1979 by Fischer-Z. John Watts and Steve Skolnik. And in “1978, the band secured a record deal with United Artists, alongside the Buzzcocks, The Stranglers and Dr. Feelgood.”

In looking at Dictionary.com, I noted that the origins of word salad go back to 1910-15. Their definition includes “incoherent speech consisting of both real and imaginary words, lacking comprehensive meaning, and occurring in advanced schizophrenic states.”

While I hadn’t heard of word salad before, I know I have committed eaten swallowed engaged in it before. Blogging, in particular, brings this condition out in me. (As you’ve probably noticed a time or two.) Having lots of different blogs and clients means that I’m writing lots of different content, and sometimes my brain moves faster than my fingers. This also happens when I talk very fast.

The term word salad seems to be a medical one, but I can’t help wondering if some of the ordinary instances (like when my sister was babbling away and when I was typing too fast to make sense) couldn’t be helped by simply slowing down just a bit. In this fast-paced world, it seems that things do get a bit jumbled, including our words. What do you think?

Image: sxc.hu.