“Sheeps” of a Feather Flock Together

Why don’t we always say what we mean? Using an example I heard from one of my friends who accidentally said, “Sheeps of a feather flock together,” I will try to explain why we sometimes say what we don’t mean.

One possible explanation is that we were caught while lying. The hypothetical person would say something like, “I know where he is… I mean I know where it is!” When the person’s mind says one thing and their mouth says another, sentences like this come out.

Another possibility is that  the person really doesn’t know the correct saying. This is common for obscure words or sayings. Copernicus is sometimes pronounced, “Copper-nick-us,” by people who don’t use the word very often. I made the mistake of calling a hyperbole a “hyper-bowly”

My third and final theory is that the person mispronounces the name on purpose because they think it sounds better in its “edited” form. Sometimes word’s just don’t look like they sound, like gnat (not that I’d mispronounce gnat on purpose, but you get what I mean) or niche. As of this moment, I cannot think of any examples of this, besides the one on the movie “Dance Flick” where a man mispronounces a word to make it seem to have an I in it. (I know that last sentence probably didn’t make sense, unless you watched the movie, sorry.