Um... is about all the verbal blunders in everyday life: the spoonerisms, malapropisms, the “uh” and “um,” the restarted sentences. On average, a native speaker of English makes no more (on average) than two slips of the tongue every 1,000 words. They also interrupt, mispronounce, or replace with “uh” and “um” about five to eight percent of their words.
Um... is also about how we listen. Only one slip of the tongue registers to our ears each week, and the fragmented, hesitant quality of speaking just doesn’t sound like that to us. Our attention rises and falls for any number of reasons, which suggests that we usually hear the blunders we want to, not necessarily the ones that are there.
To see where I first became interested in verbal blunders, read the articles I wrote for the New York Times and the Texas Observer.
At another level, Um… is about, well, a lot of things. One is, why does our attention to some verbal blunders rise and fall? Why was the spoonerism named after Reverend Spooner (and not some other absent-minded person)? Where did the Freudian slip come from? Why do we prize umlessness in speaking, and how long has that been the case? And what about President Bush?
Another thing: what are verbal blunders worth? It’s pretty typical to think of them as worthless junk, but they’re actually quite valuable. Linguists have prized them as data. Detectives and interrogators value them as clues. As media bloopers, they can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
I wrote Um... because I wanted to know what normal speaking is actually like, and I wanted to talk to people who also had an appreciation for this rich slice of life. Along the way, I learned that Thomas Edison’s earliest recorded word is “uh,” that children begin making slips of the tongue at 18 months, and that Kermit Schafer’s TV and radio bloopers are still pretty funny.
You might think, the person who writes a book about verbal blunders must make a lot of them himself, but I’m a normal speaker. I do know how my blunders differ from yours, though, and what they say about me. Do you know what your verbal blunders say about you?
