Reverend William Archibald Spooner, perhaps the most famous blunderer of them all. But he didn’t really make all the slips attributed to him, and he became so famous for his slips less because of what he said than when he lived. Read about Spooner in Chapter 1, “The Secrets of Reverend Spooner,” or listen to Michael Erard read the chapter here.
Kermit Schafer was a TV producer who collected on-air slips and gaffes and figured out how to make money from other people’s blunders, which he called “bloopers.” To read about how his media empire grew, read Chapter 7, “The Birth of Bloopers.”
Listen to his theme song, “Blooper Man.”
Giovanni Morelli, an Italian art historian, inspired Freud and others (like Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes) to chase small clues in pursuit of big conclusions. Read about his ideas on page 32 of Um...
Thomas Edison’s inventions, especially the phonograph, helped Americans hear fleeting particles of sound like “um.” Read more about his device’s impact on page 125 of Um...
Ironically, the first word of the earliest extant recording by Edison from 1888 is “uh.” You can listen to it here or read the transcript.
Arnold Zwicky, a Stanford linguist, collects all sorts of slips, including “eggcorns,” a kind of malapropism. Though a speaker chooses the wrong word, it still makes sense, like saying “eggcorn” instead of “acorn.” Read more about Zwicky, blunder maven, in Chapter 9 of Um..., “Fun with Slips.”
In the 1980s, he wrote a little handbook about all sorts of errors and mistakes.
And here he describes what it’s like to be a character in Um...
People recently began collecting eggcorns, storing them at the Eggcorn Database. Find out which slips of the tongue are becoming “mainstream.”
Randy Harvey, a lawyer and professional speaker from Oregon, won the Toastmaster’s World Championship of Public Speaking in 2004. How did he win? It’s on page 164 of Um...
Visit Randey Harvey’s website.
Ralph Smedley founded Toastmasters, a self-help club for public speakers, in 1924. He hated “um” and charged speakers who said a nickel. For more about Smedley and the origins of his club, see page 152 of Um...
Vicki Fromkin, a linguist at UCLA, taught linguists to collect slips of the tongue and analyze them seriously. Meet Fromkin, who also invented languages for movies and TV shows, starting on page 184 in Um…
Rudolf Meringer, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud’s, had a linguistic explanation for slips of the tongue. Freud disagreed. To find out whose ideas won, read Chapter 2 of Um..., “The Life and Times of the Freudian Slip.”
Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, claimed that all slips of the tongue had deep psychological origins. Was he right? To find out, read Chapter 2 of Um..., “The Life and Times of the Freudian Slip.”
