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Juulie,
I very much appreciate your comments in this thread. I, too, have a great deal of respect for language, and sometimes, just for fun, I like to play armchair linguist. I have a theory (maybe half-baked) about mistakes in language like saying 'laxadaisical,' and it seems to square reasonably well with some of what you've been arguing.
Essentially, my theory is that language is like sport: you play like you practice. By this, I mean that if one practices good fundamentals of language, then mistakes made under pressure--like, say, speaking before millions of people a la Packer, Raftery, Bilas, Bonner, et al--will be those resulting from trying to do "too much." Specifically, I'm saying that the fundamentals like word pronunciation and enunciation will be there for a person in just the way he or she has prepared for them to be. If one has made a habit of good speech, then even if one gets into trouble by trying to execute an overly complicated sentence structure, the errors should be of a syntactic or grammatical nature rather than of a more rudimentary kind.
So, I'm arguing that if one says "lackadaisical" in one's everyday speech, then when one's brain goes for that word under pressure, it will likely come out correctly.
Jay Bilas was a litigator before he was a basketball commentator. An indispensible part of his job was to execute skillful use of the language. He's spent a lot of years filling his up his well, and now when he needs to dip into it, he can do so without fear of a nuculur mess-up, or misunderestimating his on-air partner's ability to cover for him.
My claim, then, is that the announcers that make the mistakes of the sort you've been picking apart in this thread are people that generally don't care that much about good grammar, syntax, or diction; because if they did, they would practice it all the time. This is why I get so frustrated with students who get upset with me when I make language corrections in math classes. "This isn't English class; I shouldn't have to worry about that here."
So in case anybody needed a proof for the old saw about perfect practice making perfect, here it is.
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