“I misspoke”, a weaselly phrase

JORDAN EDWARDS, a black 15-year-old, was in the passenger seat of a car at a house party in Balch Springs, near Dallas, when he was shot and killed by a policeman with a rifle. The policeman’s boss later told reporters that the car had been driving “aggressively” backwards towards the officer. But after reviewing body-camera footage, it came to light that the car had been heading away from, not towards the officer. The police chief’s retraction? “I misspoke.”

More recently Diane Abbott, the British shadow home secretary, was being interviewed about her Labour Party’s plans to add 10,000 new police officers to Britain’s streets. She first gave the interviewer a cost of “about £300,000” ($388,000). Given a chance to correct this sum (£300 per officer), she changed it to £80m. Asked if this figure wasn’t also rather low, she went on to say that Labour would be recruiting 25,000 officers a year for four years, then 250,000, then 2,250, and accused the host of producing the 250,000 figure. It was an epic disaster. Her excuse? “I misspoke.”

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, distinguishes two kinds of speech mistakes: “typos” and “thinkos”. Typos are ubiquitous and listeners hardly notice many of them. Thinkos go deeper; they betray that the speaker might actually not know something. If someone says the capital of Italy is Florence, that’s probably a true thinko, unless the person is an expert in Italy who just happened to be thinking about a forthcoming holiday in Florence. But when people are caught in a thinko, they are often tempted by the “misspoke” explanation—it’s hard to prove them wrong, after all, if they say they knew the right thing but just accidentally said the wrong one. It could happen to anybody.

But the Balch Springs police chief and Ms Abbott went beyond thinkos. The first—to give the most charitable possible explanation—was telling a nationwide news audience, in the wake of a horrible tragedy, something he did not really know. This was a time for prudence, for saying as little as possible until the facts were in. But it seems that he trusted an officer’s verbal account of the story, and told that false story to the world. The true retraction should have been not “I misspoke”, but “I told you all what I wanted to be true, on completely insufficient evidence. I screwed up terribly, and I’m sorry.”

Ms Abbott’s explanation was that she had done seven interviews that day, of which the train-wreck was the last. She genuinely misspoke when she said £300,000, obviously—such a sum is trivial in national budgeting. But the jumble of numbers that followed, some of them plausible, some of them ridiculous, and her repeated stumbling and backtracking, could only be the product of a tired, stressed and hastily prepared politician having a very bad moment. An honest, self-deprecating, account—“That was awful. Pour me a drink”—would have earned her a lot of credit. Everyone has terrible days. But she insisted on pretending that the whole thing was akin to a mere typo.

Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Donald Trump, “misspoke one word” when she referred to a “Bowling Green massacre”, a supposed terrorist attack. That one little misspoken word was “massacre”—nothing of the sort took place in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Tarun Vijay, an Indian politician, said that Indians were not racist, given that they live with “black” South Indians; he, too, reached for “I misspoke”, clarifying that he merely meant that India is a country of many colours. But at least he, unlike Ms Abbott or Ms Conway, delivered a proper apology.

Public figures’ claims of “misspeaking” are inherently suspicious. Most people don’t need to point out a mere typo: these are usually obvious in the moment, and forgiven without explanation. It seems far more common that claims of misspeaking are a kind of bait-and-switch, swapping a major sin—lying, being indefensibly clueless or saying something offensive—for a minor one, a claim of having tripped over the tongue as over a carelessly tied shoelace.

In April, Mr Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, said that not even Hitler had used chemical weapons on his own people. He later apologised—and in an article about the flap in The Hill, a reporter accidentally misidentified Mr Spicer: “When asked to clarify those comments, Hitler misspoke again by saying Hitler did not use gas against his country’s people.” The mistake was online for about 20 minutes before being corrected. Talk about a typo.

Correction (May 12th): "We misspoke." In a supreme irony, we wrongly described the cost of Labour's fictional £300,000 policing plan. That would cost £30 per officer, not £300. That was awful. Apologies.