Poor old Naga Munchetty was the latest presenter to fall to the dreaded ‘cunt’ slip of the tongue on the BBC Breakfast show this morning.
This is considered one of the worst slips that a presenter can make partly because of the vulgar, distasteful connotations the word ‘cunt’ has for most viewers. The slip rarely escapes the headlines and this was no exception for Naga.
Naga Munchetty 01 Mr Cummings is under fire 02 for travelling hundreds of miles 03 from London to cunt- cunt- County Durham 04 to self isolate at his parents home in 05 when he had corona virus symptoms
Slips of the tongue (speech errors) are small mistakes that we all make as part of speech. They are unavoidable most of the time although most TV presenters and announcers prefer to minimise them.
This slip, which is classified as phoneme preservation, probably occurred due to the sound from the initial syllable /ku/ of the surname ‘Cummings’ from line 01 remaining active in the language processing centre of the brain as Munchetty tried to pronounce ‘County’ in line 03.
She had to give it three goes to get the right sound and fortunately managed to stifle the full articulation of the word ‘cunt’ but not enough for Twitter to notice which went into meltdown.
Naga joins her BBC colleague Victoria Derbyshire in adding this slip to her collection.
Classification: phoneme preservation
neutralfooting.wordpress.com 
Leave a comment