Some conversations are like bridges. Conscious of the steep drop into the unsaid and unsayable on either side, we put one word gingerly in front of another, concentrating. It is easy to lose your balance. It is impossible not to think about falling.

Often these conversations are somehow formal: they are discussions with or in front of a group, with people you respect or admire or who are just older or more important than you are. Sometimes they are about admittedly delicate matters that people might not agree on or might take very seriously, and require all parties to come to a fragile and fiercely won agreement about what is proper to say and what is not. It seems we walk over a carpet of toes.

And sometimes these conservations or situations tempt us -- practically beg us! -- to jump.

I would characterize these jumps as different than Freudian slips. A Freudian slip is supposed to reveal a deep-seated truth. Writing "girlfiend" instead of "girlfriend" indicates a marked lack of affection, bordering on resentment and, perhaps, fear. It's not an accident or a joke or an unmotivated burst of vulgarity. It's a bit of yourself peeking out from behind your words. A jump is compulsive or pathological or just plain absurd.

One night in my German class we were discussing the way that telephones are answered in Germany. Instead of just saying: "Hello?" or "Hi, how are you?," the German on either end of the line says their name, generally their last name. eg:

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg.
Hallo, DiCaprio.

or

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg hier.
Leonardo DiCaprio.

Sort of like characters in a film noir. In any case, our teacher, an Austrian woman so sweet and gentle she makes Peppermint Pattie look like Kim Jong Il, was demonstrating this exchange and she said:

Ring ring. Ring ring. (holding hand up to ear as if it were a phone)
Hallo. Eva Braun.

After she said it, she kept talking at the same pace, as we exchanged slow glances: "Did she really just say that? But that's...I mean..." And then the moment's formality broke and she apologized profusely, pinkening, explaining that she didn't know why she had said it, that she didn't mean it. I believe her. I don't think this was a slip in the traditional sense, nor that she secretly harbors Nazi sympathies, nor that she revealed anything about herself. Instead, I think she jumped, intentionally or not, into the tempting space of the worst way to end a sentence her brain could produce. If we learn anything from such a jump, it is not what lies hidden within us, but what lurks in the waves below.