There’s a lot of gaffe chat doing the rounds which has got me thinking about what really constitutes ‘a gaffe’. My theory is that a proper gaffe is not a confusion of peoples names, a proper gaffe is where, in ignorance (this is important) you ‘put your foot in it’ as us Brits would say.
For example if you were to say ‘when’s the baby due’ to a woman who is not pregnant or ‘great to meet your father’ and the other person says ‘that’s not my father, its my partner’. An inadvertent, embarrassing mistake based on a faulty assumption.
The name confusion thing is, I suggest completely different. Most of us have done it, but usually in relation to a) people we know well, family, partners (especially confusing the names of present and former partners-(I speak for myself) or b) where names are phonetically close eg Osama/Obama; easy to see how that might happen.
President Biden’s name confusion-he is prone to this- eg where he introduced to the watching world President Zelensky as Putin is something different and, it must be said, excruciating. Can someone with more knowledge than me about the relation of brain to speech explain why these confusions happen?