Please pass the . . .
Posted April 30, 2008 by gcmcdowell
More often than I care to admit I have asked people for the salt and shecker papers . . .
Um..., a natural history of verbal blunders, tells how this linguistic detritus became valuable to science, politics, speechmaking, entertainment, and our daily lives.
“...Challenges the reader to think about his or her own speech in an entirely new way.”
Publishers Weekly
“Mr. Erard’s enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. He gets you wondering about blundering.” Wall Street Journal
“Erard deftly picks his way through a junkyard of spoken debris to inform, enlighten and entertain in equal
measure.”
BookPage
“...An absorbing survey of the (mis)spoken word, from ancient Egyptian cases of speechlessness to television bloopers...”
O Magazine
“...A fascinating look at those two-letter words we all know and, uh, overuse.” GQ
“Who’d have thought that a book called ‘Um’ could be a page-turner?...a fascinating meditation on why blunders happen, and what they tell us about language and ourselves.”
Geoff Nunberg, University of
California at Berkeley
“Erard dives deep into the hows and whys of verbal blunders and the biological realities of language, letting us off the psychological hook.”Minnesota Star-Tribune
“You can feel when an author is enjoying himself, and Erard’s survey of these most common of dysfunctions in our dysfunctional society is written with unexpected humor, grace and high spirits.” Louisville Courier-Journal
Zeitlinguistgeist Geoff Nunberg discusses “um” and plugs Um... on Fresh Air on April 14.
Arnold Zwicky is Linguist of the Day over at the Linguist List.
Somebody’s grandmother gets Um…
I weigh in on the Obama/Osama confusion for Portfolio mag’s media blog here and here.
Um… takes the Page 69 test.
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I talked to Julie Kredens, the very engaging host of State of Affairs on WFPL in Louisville, on Dec. 5.
Tamara Ikenberg gets me to expound on lolcat for the Louisville Courier-Journal, here.