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Why Do You Say Gore When You Mean Bush?

Emily Yoffe
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2000, at 4:16 PM ET

And why do you say Bush when you mean Gore? From pundits on television to people at the water cooler, everyone is substituting the name of one candidate for the other.

To linguists this slip of the tongue is called a semantic substitution or a lexical access slip. It's easy to understand why it is happening. The brain organizes information across many categories, and Bush and Gore, the men and the names, nicely fit next to each other in the same slots.

  1. Both men are presidential candidates, so when trying to call up the name of one of them, the other is naturally signaled. This is why parents often call their children by each other's names.
  2. Both are attractive white men in their 50s. There wasn't so much categorical confusion about Reagan and Carter.
  3. Information we get about one always refers to the other. And often the information is similar, i.e. making speeches in four states in 24 hours.
  4. Though they have different positions, they are not speaking across a cavernous ideological divide, like Nixon and McGovern, which helps the brain create separate categories.
  5. Both names have one syllable. The number of syllables a word has and its stress patterns--where the emphasis falls when you pronounce a word--are a major feature of how the mental dictionary is structured. That meant confusing the names Clinton and Bush was less likely.
  6. The names are similar phonetically. Both begin with what is called a voice-stopped consonant, of which there are three in English: B, D,G. And the vowel sounds of each are what's known as back-rounded vowels, of which there are four.
  7. Both words have four letters, and many people visualize words in their written form.



This confusion will lessen as one man gets his own category in our brains: president of the United States.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Robert Rodman of North Carolina State University, Steven Pinker of MIT, and Merrill Garrett of the University of Arizona.

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Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can send your Human Guinea Pig suggestions or comments to .
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: There were lots of jokes, like this one "I thought they were the same person. Hard to imagine that there could be two people as unfit to be president." The name "Bore" was floated, not usually as eruditely as K. Keller's claim that this reflects "elision more than interjection/confusion, it would seem". And we liked a reference to Mt Bushgore.]


Gore is all about the environment so his name should be about nature. Like a BUSH. Bush is all about the death penalty and coat hangers. He should have a bloody name. Like GORE. That's why I get them mixed up.

--Rich Gold

(To reply, click here.)


The arguments that people will get 'Gore' and 'Bush' confused make sense; but I remember reading once that people also get 'Armstrong' and 'Montgomery' confused. Is this true? Does it make sense? Or is it just a psycholinguistic urban legend?

--Matt Feinstein

(To reply, click here.)

(11/10)

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