Slip Number 2025-17
Date: April 25, 2025

• Utterance: You know, that way I can kill two stones with one bird.
• Target: You know, that way I can kill two birds with one stone.
• Discussion: This is a syntactic slip: you could call it a metathesis: two words swapped places. It's considered syntactic because all the words were chosen correctly (no real problem on the lexical front) but they were dropped into the sentence frame in the wrong places. Notice that the plural morpheme stayed put in its correct spot during all this

  You might use that little piece of information to make hypotheses about how English morphemes get distributed in sentences. If you put the morphemes on when yu choose a word, you might make this error:

  You know, that way I can kill two stone with one birds.

  But, we don't get this kind of error very often. Usually, (but not always) the morpheme stays in its correct spot in the sentence when the words swap.

  In any case, this reminds me of the good ol' days of listening to Pomplamoose singing the Angry Birds theme song