Um... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, the first book to tell you everything you want to know about malapropisms, Spoonerisms, Freudian slips, Bushisms, bloopers, and other speech errors, as well as "uh" and "um," stuttering, and a range of normal speech disfluency, why they happen, how often they happen, and what they mean, by Michael Erard.

Reviews

Keene Equinox

‘Um...’ explores linguistic ‘prommon coblems’ throughout society

by Brittney Sousa

“Um…” is a ground breaking book that talks about something that is often not discussed; the errors in our speech and the speech of our political figures.
How many times have we criticized our president for a speech in which he used a word incorrectly? How many occasions have we been so tongue tied we said “uh” and “um” in the absence of actual words? Why do we do this?

Michael Erard, the author of this book attempts to speak to us, the people, about what started these verbal slips or “spoonerisms”, when they began, why they occur, and what the future of verbal blunders may be.

The author, Michael Erard is more than qualified to analyze these linguistic mistakes in our society. He was a graduate of Williams College where he received a MA in Linguistics. Not only does he have a MA, he is a doctor of English from The University of Texas.

It appears that he is a successful and well published writer who has appeared in major publications such as The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly.
The book begins by telling the readers about Reverend Spooner, the creator of the verbal blunder, the big speech error maker, and what most “spoonerisms” or speech malfunctions are named after. “Excuse me, but I think you are occupewing my pie,” said Spooner.

It then speaks of the classic Freudian slip in our speech and how often times verbal errors are our subconscious minds speaking to the public when in truth that often is not the case. In fact, Meringer, the first scientist to study the verbal blunder, decided that there are two kinds of slips in language. There are anticipation slips and perseveration slips as well. It’s not a random happening, it’s a pattern but it does not imply that what you sincerely mean to say will slip out at times when is most inconvenient.

The most compelling chapter of this book, I would say, was the President Blunder chapter. We see this on television, read it in magazines, and hear about them on the radio.

Erard points his finger towards Dan Quayle who in his time in the lime light was often called “the human punch line,” where as President Bush is often criticized for his grammatical mistakes and mispronunciations while giving important speeches. He also is accused of flip flopping even within his sentences.
For example, “I did denounce it, I de-denounced. I denounced interracial dating. I denounced anti-catholic bigacy-bigotry…No I-I-I spoke out against interracial dating. I mean, I support the policy of interracial dating.” That is very unclear. What is he saying? What is the problem? That is most of what Erard looks at in his research.

I found the book to be extremely informational but a bit on the dry side. For the most part he spoke the audience that he meant to, the informed public, and he send the message that he seemed to want to spread.

Personally, I felt that the information was often repeated in many different ways and although it offered me insights it did not show me much of his own personal opinion about the topic which I would have enjoyed seeing more of. His opinion was there but it was overshadowed by facts and other theorists on the same subject.

I was mildly disappointed by the book but only because of what I was expecting it to be. However, the book was an extremely clever one that put an issue to light that most people probably don’t consider on a daily basis that is important.

When people speak for themselves or their country and make millions of verbal blunders it gives a different image then intended. Whether that is a good thing or not I do no know but I know that it is a “prommon coblem”. Excuse me, a common problem in our society.

See the original review here.

From The Preface, IU South Bend (Oct. 15, 2008)

Get, uh, a fascinating…um…view of how we really speak
By: Jason Overholt

In “Um…,” Non-fiction novelist Michael Erard reveals just how unfair our attitudes are towards errors in speech. From childhood, we are told to avoid the ums, errs and uhs that, according to Erard, are biological in origin and serve an important function in communication.

A large amount of these verbal “blunders” are called disfluencies. Disfluencies include the aforementioned pause fillers, repeated words, mid-sentence corrections, prolonged vowels and syllables, and silent pauses.

Erard chronicles the history of blunders and their study, which he thinks of as “blunderology”. They are mistakes that everyone makes, a lot -something you will notice more of after reading this book. It wasn’t until we gained the ability to record speech that these everyday unsmooth moments became so obvious to the public, becoming a focus of derision.

“…the rules for ‘good speaking’ -at least in modern America, don’t account for some of the biological facts of language,” Erard writes. “To me, this says something else about the human experience: We live in social groups that make and follow rules that constrain the part of us that’s a biological organism with an amazing brain.”

“Um…” starts in ancient Greece, works through Frued and the slips that bear his name, and finishes with a revealing look at modern politicians and how we hungrily wait for them to say something stupid.

Erard pulls together centuries of research and scientific anecdotes, revealing that disfluency isn’t the result of carelessness or stupidity, but just the opposite. He describes an internal moderator in all of our brains that catches errors even as we are saying them. It is the people who are careful about their speech who pause ("um" is another way to say “hold on, I’m thinking"), backup, and edit on the fly.

Erard also chronicles the study of true slips of the tongue. These are word and sound substitutions, blends, and many other speech errors - like saying “wasabi” instead oh “Wahhabi,” or “counterism” instead of “counterterrorism” (in George W. Bush’s case). These kinds of errors make those in the public view look ridiculous, but Erard will make you feel a little sheepish for poking fun.

Ultimately Erard reveals an aspect of daily life that usually doesn’t register with us. Normal English speakers make 7 to 22 slips of the tongue a day. That’s one slip for every 1,000 words. We have 2 to 4 moments where finding the right word or name takes an embarrassing amount of time. Simple disfluencies are involved in 5 to 8 percent of the words we speak every day. To better facilitate communication, our brains are hardwired to ignore most of these errors and disfluencies.

In this era of the “gaffe,” Erard makes a good case for forgiveness. He reveals the simple beauty that can be found in a little hemming, hawing, stumbling, pausing, or repetition. Remember that the next time you watch a political speech or debate. Don’t be, um, a pot calling the bettle klack.

From The Anniston Star

Fumbles of speech: A quirkily appealing mix of scholarly thought, diverting anecdote and catchy prose
By Bill Hug

Michael Erard reduces Marshall McLuhan’s adage “The medium is the message” to its most basic terms: the ways we manage to garble our own speech.

The varieties of clumsiness we commit in our oral medium could convey lots of messages — glimpses of the subconscious, spasms of creativity, neurological misfires or mimicry of cultural convention.

But Erard’s book is less a taxonomy of verbal missteps and their meanings than a volume of personal essays on “applied blunderology” — a quirkily appealing mix of scholarly thought, diverting anecdote and catchy prose.

The author covers the spectrum of possibilities concerning the origins, types and significances of speech errors (he even provides a glossary), and punctuates this with pertinent stories of individuals and events.

Here’s where readers may find particular enjoyment: amid Erard’s meanderings in rhetoric, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory and popular culture, he offers deft and witty interludes, accounts of this or that character or episode, that enlighten as well as divert.

From classical rhetoricians like Aristotle and Quintilian, we’re taken to Reno, Nev., site of Toastmasters International’s annual public speaking contest, the self-proclaimed “World Series of Public Speaking, the Olympics of Oratory.” Here, we meet a gaggle of boosters straight out of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt.

A bit more linguistic commentary brings us to the story of TV producer Kermit Schafer, creator of the original “blooper” franchise — 30 blooper records, a dozen blooper books, many more blooper television shows, and a movie entitled Pardon my Blooper. With Erard, as with any gifted essayist, much of the fun is simply in watching the striking movement of a bright mind.

As he examines possible meanings of humankind’s tendency to verbally foul up, the author is concerned with laying out alternatives rather than arriving at definitive conclusions. He’s skeptical of Freud’s notion of speech errors solely as glimmers of repressed urges or fears, though he doesn’t dismiss it outright.

He’s more open to other possibilities: speech errors as reflections of a creative urge to expand the lingual envelope, as cognitive or neurological malfunctions, as unconscious expressions of emotion, as reflections of socioeconomic status.

This tendency to acknowledge all positions is most apparent in his accounts of the verbal blunders Americans look at especially closely — those of our presidents. Of course, our current leader and his linguistic boondoggles, from “terriers and barriffs” to, “It’s hard to put food on your family,” garner particular examination.

Yet Erard wonders if Bush’s verbal glitches are truly worse than those of some of his predecessors — for instance, Eisenhower, whose ramblings during press conferences often left reporters at a loss; or Jefferson, who delivered both his inaugural addresses in a halting whisper; or Coolidge, who wouldn’t allow reporters to quote him directly.

Then, too, the exact words of recent presidents — gaffes and all — are far more available to the nation than those of our earlier leaders. Nevertheless, Erard suggests that the urge to regard Bush’s verbal clumsiness as reflection of his “authenticity” or his ties to the common man may constitute an abandonment of standards.

Um is a surprisingly enjoyable book on what might sound dike a tull lopic—I mean, tike a lull dopic — I mean …

Bill Hug is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.

To read the original article, go here.

The Millions

by language blogger LanguageHat

The second book came out just this year: Michael Erard’s Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. Erard got a master’s degree in linguistics before going into journalism, and it shows; he’s one of the few reporters who consistently gets it right. He writes knowledgeably and with verve, packing in fascinating bits of information on each page; for instance, in talking about the “Freudian slip” he provides a detailed dissection of one of Freud’s most famous examples, the case of the young man who tried to quote a line from The Aeneid but left out a word - for Freud, an extremely significant slip that stemmed from the man’s fear that his lover was pregnant. Erard cites other researchers who point out that it can be analyzed as a perfectly normal speech error, and that if you take the Freudian attitude you could provide “insightful” interpretations no matter which word was left out. In Chapter 5 he gives “A Brief History of ‘Um’,” explaining that he started by assuming that the condemnation of “filler words” went all the way back to the ancients but found that it didn’t really begin until the 19th century (Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “Don’t strew the pathway with those dreadful urs” in 1846) and didn’t become popular until the 20th. He talks about Reverend Spooner (he who toasted Queen Victoria by asking for “three cheers for our queer old dean” and greeted a group of farmers as “noble tons of soil"), Thomas Edison (a recording of one of his public exhibitions of the phonograph is full of “uh"s), linguist Victoria Fromkin and her insistence on the importance of slips of the tongue, and all manner of other tidbits. If you’re looking for a present for someone who loves language, I can’t think of a more enjoyable one.

The Austin Chronicle

BY SCOTT BLACKWOOD

Austinite Michael Erard’s book Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, $24.95) has garnered significant attention for the way it represents the most human thing about us: that we err and err again, especially verbally. However, as Erard points out, errors make for a rich slice of life. A linguist who earned his Ph.D. in English at UT, he’s also a journalist who writes about language at the intersection of technology, policy, politics, law, and science. He is a contributing writer at The Texas Observer, and his work has been featured in the Chronicle, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Slate. His fiction appeared in the anthology New Stories From the South: 2000 – The Year’s Best, and he was runner-up for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship in 2006. Recently, Erard has done a number of interviews for radio and TV – for this publication, he responded to questions via e-mail – and, as if on cue, verbal blunders have slunk past their owners and onto the airwaves.

Austin Chronicle: You’ve taken a different approach to verbal blunders than many previous books have – your focus is on the ways verbal gaffes are symptoms of being fully human.

Michael Erard: Gary Dell, a cognitive scientist at University of Illinois who has done a lot of work on speech errors, puts it this way, which I think is great: In order to be able to produce novel language, which we do every day, all the time, our language systems have to be flexible, but that same flexibility means that sometimes you get novelty when you don’t need it or anticipate it.

AC: In fact, you ask sympathy for our wayward tongues.

ME: I’m asking for the range of reactions. How does these things happen? How can I extract information from them? How can I make money from them? Am I normal? The whole basic approach to speech errors (or accidents in speaking) and disfluencies (the hesitations and interruptions of speaking) has been either to list them, to laugh at them, or to judge them. It turns out there are more interesting and productive subtle ways of talking about talking. It also turns out that the things we call “errors” have a cultural history to them – note that avoiding “uh” and “um” in speaking wasn’t something Americans did until the early 20th century.

AC: You point out our Spooner didn’t actually say the many “spoonerisms” that are attributed to him. Is this another example of Freud’s ideas about the uses of humor, to create a kind of rampant and exaggerated world of blunder to ease our anxieties about ourselves?

ME: So it’s well known that people notice far fewer speech errors than actually occur. On an individual basis, our attention to these moments flickers in and out. I also think there’s a kind of cultural attention to errors that comes in and out of focus. Some individuals (some real, some fictional) or groups give their names (or have them taken) for some errors or absurdities – for instance, the “Irish bull,” which is a sort of nonsense saying like, “I hope I never have to see my wife become a widow,” or a Wellerism, which is named after a Charles Dickens character, which, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an expression of comparison comprising a usually well-known quotation followed by a facetious sequel,” such as “Short visits are best, said the fly as he lit on the hot stove” or “I don’t remember seeing you before, as the lawyer said to his conscience.” Wellerisms flourished in American newspapers between 1840 and 1880 and were the elite’s way of making fun of the popular use of proverbs.

AC: Were there monumental blunderers you didn’t include in the book because of limits of space or because of the scarcity of secondary sources?

ME: There are some apocryphal stories related to famous blunderers which I didn’t include. We all know about Reverend William Archibald Spooner, for whom the spoonerism (such as the time he announced a chapel hymn as “Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take") was named. Fewer people know about his younger brother, Sir Evelyn, who left the family business for India in 1860 to became a colonial administrator and ended his life in a tea plantation in Ceylon. In his day he was a more extravagant blunderer than his brother – in fact, family letters suggested that he departed for the colonies because his absentminded reversals had caused so much social and emotional turmoil in his Victorian surroundings. He was said to resent how William’s spoonerisms gained him international notoriety and once told someone that “the spoonerism was maimed after knee, sea I may, and Willie’s tolerance shouldn’t be affronted.”

AC: Have you lost your sense of humor while sympathizing so much with blunderers, as one critic suggested?

ME: I don’t think so, no.

Pop Matters

According to Michael Erard, we screw-up what we say when we speak at a rate of approximately one in every ten words. I don’t know if that’s a source for consolation or worry. Although this book traces verbal fumbles all the way back to ancient Greece, what first came to my mind when I saw this title was, of course, the famed lip-tripper of our day: George W. Bush. Indeed, Bush’s blunders during the 2000 presidential campaign (and the press and the public’s response to them) are what sparked Erard’s interest in the topic.His approach is rather scientific, albeit in an entertaining manner, and you will leave this book armed with a vocabulary to identify each type of common blunder, as well as a better-tuned ear for the gaffes made in everyday conversation that more forgiving types tend to overlook, or overhear, as it were. But, he gently warns, resist the urge to correct those speaking to you, lest you send them into a stuttering rage. The drama student, the psychology major, and the otherwise linguistically inclined will be well-served by the work done here.

Read the original, by Karen Zarker, here.

From the Charleston Post and Courier

by Ann Mitchell

With looming presidential primaries, the ubiquitous presence of YouTube and a certain “decider” in the White House, the timing of “Um” hardly could have been better.

In this nifty little book, author Michael Erard looks at the types of language gaffes we all make — and why we laugh, sometimes uncomfortably, when others make them.

Erard explores more than just our verbal missteps — President Bush’s “misunderestimate” and description of himself as “the decider,” for example, or John Kerry’s use of the word “wasabi,” the Japanese version of horseradish, when he meant “Wahhabi,” a fundamentalist Islamic sect. He also considers the meaning of smaller flubs that we might think of as linguistic toe-stubbing: the “ums,” “uhs” and “ers” that pepper our everyday conversations.

Erard, who has a master’s in linguistics and a Ph.D. in English, also delves into the history of verbal blunders, including the “Freudian slip,” which the author says has come to mean something very different than what Freud had in mind.

Erard writes in a readable style that doesn’t get too scientifically weighty for an average reader, and he keeps things lively and topical with up-to-the-minute references to politics and culture.

Readers are likely to come away enlightened about their own linguistically challenged moments and with new insights about why other people’s gaffes are so fascinating to us.

The article, as it appeared online, is here.

From the Waterloo Record (Canada)

by Bill Bean

Who knew there was so much to know about slips of the tongue?

Journalist Michael Erard leverages recent interest in gaffes by U.S. President George W. Bush into this parsing of language slips and society’s responses to them.

The author explains common speech blunders and how they differ, including slips of the tongue (an involuntary deviation from the speaker’s intended choice of words), malapropisms (the accidental substitution of one word for another), spoonerisms (an exchange of sounds—getting the mirds wixed) and pause fillers (um, ah and uh).

These and other disfluencies might have been ignored in the age before recorded sound, but Freud’s interest in the underlying cause of verbal slips—in his view, a sexual repression that came to be known as the Freudian slip—turned the analysis of speech into a science.

Erard visits Toastmasters conventions and laboratories to meet those who try to perfect the spoken word and those who study it.

Along the way, we learn that children younger than three or four, and people with enough beer in them, seldom use pause fillers in the middle of sentences, that the use of pause fillers cannot be correlated to any particular personality trait and that every adult commits about seven to 22 verbal slips a day.

This is a fascinating book—and for anyone plagued by speech errors, a comforting one.

The original piece is here .

From The Battalion

by Christie Ashie

(Texas A&M) Michael Erard, a linguist with a masters and doctorate degree from the University of Texas, has gathered the speculations and studies of linguists throughout the ages to examine the occurrence and meaning of “slips, stumbles and verbal blunders” in his new book Um. . .

Erard begins by tracing verbal blunders through history. He examines prominent kinds of verbal blunders: spoonerisms, Freudian slips, anticipations and perseverations. The information is supported by enough tested evidence. Then, however, he moves into greyer areas. What do these verbal blunders say about their speakers? Do they relate a lack of intelligence or lack of speaking skills? Are they the result of faulty education or simply indicate the emotional state of the speaker?

In addition, Erard asks if children commit the same verbal blunders as adults and whether or not adults commit fewer or more verbal blunders than children. Erard also wonders if verbal blunders increase with age or business.

As the book progresses, Erard narrows his focus from general verbal errors to the very specific word “um.” He begins by trying to trace the modern abhorrence of the word “um” back through history. This particular speech filler, now the object of critique by virtually every communications department in the world, seems to annoy all modern listeners. “Don’t say um,” speech instructors, parents, professors and friends insist.

What Erard has discovered is that - well, there is nothing to discover. “Um” was not discussed in speech books or oral techniques until the popularization of the radio. Thousands of years of rhetoricians, including records from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, do not so much as mention speech fillers; rather, they focus on content and elocution, or the oral delivery of speeches. Apparently, “um” became annoying only when we began hearing it all the time in programmed speaking.

What does “um” mean and what does it indicate? Erard examines several prominent theories, so you’ll have to read his book and decide for yourself.

Erard’s book is carefully and thoughtfully organized. While he provides enough basic information about the theories he examines to make his book enjoyable to laymen, he does not bore those familiar with linguistics.

His book spans the study of rhetoric and linguistics up to the media’s exploitation of President George W. Bush’s tendency to create words while on national television. Informative and interesting, Erard’s book is a great read. Beware, though - after you read his book you will find yourself constantly identifying, counting and even recording the verbal blunders of those around you. Um. . . enjoy it!

The original is here.

From the Daily News Record

by Lucy Bednar

(Harrisonburg, Virginia) In the intriguingly titled “Um,” journalist Michael Erard examines “Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.” His exploration of speech errors, why they occur and what they might mean, is based on a series of revealing contrasts and contrasting opinions, all of which underscore how little we actually know about the brain and how it processes and produces language.

According to Erard, the average modern American speaks anywhere from 7,500 to 22,500 words a day. “Grabbing these words, one every four hundred milliseconds on average,” he says, “requires a symphony of neurons working quickly and precisely” to arrange, edit and review what we plan to say before we say it.

However, the elements of language (sounds, words and grammatical items) are not arranged neatly in the brain, like books on a library shelf. “Rather, they’re associated with one another in a matrix or web,” offering many paths of access to the linear form they must ultimately take — “because we have a mouth through which only one word at a time can come.” Verbal blunders are to be expected; “they occur as the brain shifts from planning to executing or back again ... Blundering is something that normal speakers normally do.”

But what exactly is a verbal blunder? It is not, Erard explains, the kind of error caused by a speech disorder manifesting itself in slurring or stuttering. Nor is it the kind of error we might associate with slang, regionalisms or nonstandard dialects. The slips and disfluencies Erard is interested in arise from “organic flashes in the brain.”

The Rev. William Archibald Spooner, who taught at Oxford University in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was famous for a kind of verbal slip that still bears his name. A spoonerism involves the transposition of sounds at the beginning of words. Supposedly, the Rev. Spooner once chastised a student for “fighting a liar in the quadrangle,” and told another, “You have hissed all of my mystery lectures.” Unlike a verbal slip, a disfluency interrupts the smooth flow of speech and can include repeating a word, restarting a sentence, or saying “um” or “uh.”

Erard claims that “um” and “uh” are, in fact, natural components of speech. Our perception of them as signs of verbal disfluency results from historical factors that have influenced our expectations, such as the publication of public speaking textbooks and the evolution of radio and television. We have come to expect control, and because errors suggest lack of control — especially the intrusive “um” and “uh” — they become undesirable and even suspect.

Erard’s factual information is interesting, but he is especially compelling when he presents the often conflicting opinions on how verbal blunders should be interpreted. If we accept Freud’s view that verbal slips are “products of the will —willed by the dynamics of the unconscious,” then such slips tell us about a person’s true self. The Freudian slip is “a thread strung through a labyrinth,” which an analyst can follow to uncover a repressed fear or desire.

If, on the other hand, we accept the view of Rudolf Meringer, a contemporary of Freud’s, such slips tell us more about language than about the psyche. With the help of his colleague Carl Mayer, Meringer collected and classified a range of speech errors and in 1895 published “Misspeaking and Misreading.” Meringer was among the first to demonstrate that speech errors were worth collecting and examining, an approach used productively by many linguists ever since.

Because we have come to see almost everything in terms of performance, including identity, people often use verbal blunders to assess “personality traits, intelligence, emotional tendencies, thinking style, and behavioral habits.” Such conclusions, Erard warns, are unreliable. They may, however, tell us something about cognitive overload, anxiety, mental disorganization or physical fatigue. Knowing the context of a communication is crucial.

In a chapter called President Blunder, Erard examines the speaking style of our country’s best-known contemporary blunderer, George W. Bush. Before turning to Bush, however, he looks briefly at the speaking styles of some former presidents, among them Thomas Jefferson, who hated to speak in public and was not especially good at it; Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman, both of whom forbid reporters to quote them verbatim; and Franklin Roosevelt, who, “frustrated with being misquoted by reporters, installed the first recording system in the Oval Office.”

Erard remains objective in his assessment of Bush, asking readers to consider two opposing points of view. On the one hand, judging how good or how smart someone is based solely on verbal fluency can “smear a larger set of people” than we realize, he says, including nonnative speakers of English, those with speech impediments and the elderly.

On the other hand, ignoring verbal disfluency sends the message that standards don’t matter. “We should neither accept nor reward public figures ... whose speaking style is full of errors, and who flaunt those errors,” Erard says. If we dispose of standards, claiming to value what’s authentic over what’s excellent, we invite shoddiness and indirectly concede that some people cannot rise to the standards.

“Speaking is one of the most complicated human activities we do at any age.” It’s normal to make one or two slips for every 1,000 words we speak, and to make more slips as we age. However, it’s a mistake to see verbal slips only in a negative light. “Verbal blundering is integral to language, not something that intrudes upon it,” Erard claims, just as a window is not merely a hole in a wall, but an architecturally integral part of the wall that contains it.

Erards’s exploration of verbal blunders raises numerous intriguing questions, and anyone with an interest in language will find his observations thought provoking. However, he warns that reading the book will make us more aware of verbal slips, and that heightened awareness may pause croblems.

The original is here.

From the Dubai Gulf Times

by Sara Saleh

Talk to the tab (cab) driver or ‘short shirt’, when you meant to say ‘short skirt’… how about when you start a sentence with ‘er, er, er...’?

Like me, you may be a generally articulate, well-worded sort of person, but that does not seem to stop a barrage of verbal blunders like the above slipping from your mouth out of absolutely nowhere. (One of the most famous ones quoted in the book is “You have hissed all my mystery lectures.")

These are everyday linguistic phenomena that happen to the best of us, and in his book, Um Michael Erard threads together these peculiarities of humanity: language and the art of mixing it all up.

The act of misspeaking is a fascinating discovery not only of unconscious or bad habits, but also the most basic properties of the language and the way in which our mind, and its dynamics, connects thoughts to sounds - whether we are thinking about technology or philosophy or even sports.

Systematic compilations of verbal errors have been recorded for centuries. The first was Arab scholar Al-Kisali’s The Errors of Populace.

Today, for those interested in psychology and its cognitive and developmental aspects, this book is considered a discerning exposition of the relations between memory and speech and how we assign meaning and learn language in the first place.

Although Erard’s writing style seems at times contradictory, this book draws out some interesting, if not unlikely, theories.

A personal favourite are the conjectures Erard makes in a section dedicated to US President George Bush and his linguistic, er, ways.

* Author of the week: Michael Erard

Born in Texas, US, and raised in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, a young Erard grew up writing stories. After his first job working at a newspaper when he was 14, Erard decided to follow his flair for writing.

Erard went to college in Massachusetts and then travelled to Taiwan where he spent two years teaching English.

In 1993, he went back to Texas to pursue graduate study and was awarded an MA in linguistics in 1996. He then went on to graduate with a PhD in English in 2000.

In 1998, he became a contributing writer for the Texas Observer.

With his popular works on culture, politics and technology frequently appearing in publications such as the New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Scientist and Lingua Franca, it wasn’t long before Erard decided to write his own first book.

UM, is his recently released debut novel, in which Erard is on a linguistic quest to explore and explain the meanings behind our verbal slips and stumbles.

Erard and his wife live in Austin, Texas.

The original piece is here.

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel

by Wallace Baine

There’s a popular snippet of video making the rounds of YouTube nation these days that is surely drawing the interest of linguist Michael Erard. A contestant in the Miss Teen USA contest — she was blond and from South Carolina, if it matters, and surely it does — is called on to answer a question about her fellow Americans’ general inability to find their own country on a map. After floating the laughably absurd premise that many Americans can’t read maps because they don’t have maps, the flustered would-be beauty queen embarks on such a breathtaking string of inanities and non sequiturs, the clip may live on in college-level linguistic courses for decades.

One of the most prominent by-products of the Internet revolution is an ever-increasing interest in the verbal gaffe, from the president on down to poor Miss Teen South Carolina. But as Erard reminds us in his crisply presented treatise “Um ... Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean” [Pantheon, $24.95], misspeaking has both a history and a science.

The book is a compendium of what Erard calls “disfluencies,” which could be anything from malapropisms to Freudian slips to spoonerisms, the inadvertent flipping of sounds or words in a phrase, such as praising God as a “shoving leopard” rather than a “loving shepherd” But the author reserves his most meticulous analysis for a subject most of us would think to be immune from analysis, the use of the utterances “um” and “uh”

For one thing, there’s a difference between the two, this according to a pair of researchers Erard cites in his book, one of whom, Jean Fox Tree, hails from UC Santa Cruz. You probably didn’t know it, but you employ the word “um” to telegraph to the person to whom you’re speaking that the pause that follows will be longer than if you had used “uh” I wonder if our friends in the Santa Cruz improv group Um Gee Um are aware of that.

Erard goes into what surely must be the most exhaustive analysis of what surely must be the most insubstantial word in English — but, aha, it’s not just English; other languages have their verbal placeholders as well. This is the most droopy part of the book and may prompt you to over-listen to others’ conversations to see how they use “um” and “uh” And who really wants to do that?

As a journalist for 20 years, I have transcribed hundreds of interviews and have always taken notice of the patterns in any given speaker’s fluency and rhythm. I learned long ago that hardly anyone speaks without resorting to some kind of verbal impurities, and I’m working from a highly selective sample, either people who talk for a living, or are well versed in the ritual of the press interview.
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As a linguist, Erard is interested in exploding the stereotypes of disfluency, namely that people only stumble because they’re nervous or are dissembling in some way. Not necessarily true, says “Um” Men, for instance, are more prone to verbal blunders than women. Young children and the elderly, more so than the general adult population. You’re more likely to be disfluent on the phone than in person, or with your hands in your pockets.

Where the book fails, however, is in distinguishing between two wholly separate kinds of verbal miscues, between those who tread carefully — which is, it seems to me, where many of the uhs and ums come from — and those who charge roughshod over the language. As a lifelong stutterer, I’ve had to adapt by speaking more slowly to avoid verbal land mines and, as a result, my speech pattern is full of hesitations and perambulations. But because of that, I rarely mangle the language.

Which brings us to the real star of “Um” It takes him nine chapters to get there, but eventually Erard does address the man he calls “President Blunder,” he who has contributed to the language the charming word “misunderestimate”

George W. Bush faces scorn from all corners these days, and there is no reason to believe he would be spared by a linguist. But Erard does point out that the media have played a central role in Bush’s famous assaults on English. He goes back to 1999, when then-Gov. Bush was just one of several contenders for the White House. In the race then was former veep Dan Quayle, whose past tangles with the language made him a lightning rod for criticism. It wasn’t until Quayle dropped out of the race that the press began to take notice of Bush’s sins of usage.

Outside of the realm of this book, of course, is what the media’s fascination with Bush’s speech patterns has wrought: the age of the gaffe. A candidate who misspeaks on the campaign trail is more likely to be sunk by it now than ever, a lesson learned by Miss Teen South Carolina. But a gaffe these days is more an uncomfortable truth not meant to be uttered than a lie or a mistake or a “slip of the tongue”

Such “gotcha” tactics by the press and the YouTube tattlers have rendered our political discourse distressingly bland and tasteless. In that context, “uh” and “um” don’t sound quite so unintelligent.

The piece originally appeared here.

From the Seattle Times

by David Williams

Have you, um, ever noticed, ur, uh, how people giving speeches often stumble or slip up when they get to key points? They might pause, state the wrong word, or forget to use a word. They may even slip up when they get to key points and repeat themselves. They might switch words around. They might combine two words and make them one.

Researchers have found that we regularly make verbal blunders — some say as high as one for every 10 words we speak; others put the number at one per 1,000. Blunders occur in every language, whether spoken or signed, and have been noted from ancient Greece through the infamous Reverend Spooner to our current error-prone president.

Although we often laugh at such errors, they tell us more than we realize, says author/linguist Michael Erard, in his engaging first book, “Um ... Slips. Stumbles, Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.” “In general, anyone who thinks or acts at the same time as they speak, especially under pressure, will blunder,” writes Erard.

Consider the ever popular pause filler, um or uh. We use um more often when on a phone than face to face. Women and younger people, as well as those who gesture, say um less often.

We may view um-ers as bad or anxious speakers, but research shows that ums don’t necessarily correlate with anxiety. Ums often appear when something else, such as an additional task, taxes your brain. Ums in conversational speech arise as part of a waltz, with speakers uming as a means to interact with a listener. Ums may also signal that the speaker is actively thinking and considering their word choices.

By focusing on what many of us overlook (or underhear?), Erard has further revealed the complexity and beauty of language. Perhaps he will make all of us both better listeners and, um, better speakers.

Read the full piece here.

From the New Yorker

The Sept. 3 issue of the New Yorker treats Um... in its “Briefly Noted” section.

From the Chicago Sun-Times

In the business of journalism, which continues to evolve in this Internet age, we still deal primarily with words. Words, words and more words.

Reporters listen to words from their subjects and then write stories based on those words. Editors read those words for clarity and comprehension. Copy editors are next, reading the words for spelling, grammar and syntax before checking facts and writing headlines. Pressmen get the words on the page.

If we’ve done our jobs perfectly, there are no holes, gaffes, spelling errors or outright blunders.

Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that we are never 100-percent perfect, and after reading Um ... Slips Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, 273 pages, $24,95) by Michael Erard, I have to admit I’m glad I’m in the print business rather than any kind of business that requires public speaking, because if nothing else, at least we have a backspace button to save us from our subconscious selves.

The author of Um… is a linguist who became fascinated with George W. Bush’s speaking goofs and his subsequent portrayal in the media during his first campaign for president; so fascinated that he delves into the history of the verbal blunder, from the Rev. William Archibald Spooner, originator of the “spoonerism” (the transposition of sounds, e.g. “Give three cheers for our queer old dean") to the Freudian slip (a term not coined until the 1950s) to Toastmasters, TV blooper shows and modern politics.

He differentiates between slips of the tongue—“I caked a bake” or “I have to smoke my coffee with a cigarette”—and speech disfluencies, which include interruptions and pause fillers like “uh,” “um” and repeated words. There are also boners (a “doesn’t know better” error), malapropisms (misuse of similar sounding or synonymous words), eggcorns (incorrect usage that almost makes sense: “exercise regiment” instead of “exercise regimen") and slips of the hand (made by speakers of sign language).

Erard’s research ultimately tells us that we are all guilty of the verbal blunder, and most of us don’t even notice it day to day—in ourselves or in others. Heck, Americans by and large have even given President Bush a pass as two elections have shown we prefer the more “authentic” speechmaker to smooth-talking politicos.

And, um, in the end, if the, um, message is heard, who really cares about a few “ums”?

The original article is here.

From the Louisville Courier-Journal

By David Walton
Special to The Courier-Journal

Most books about public speaking focus on how to speak fluently, and treat speech dysfunctions, or “disfluencies”—all those um’s and er’s and slips of the tongue—as meaningless distractions that the trained speaker can eliminate.

Michael Erard’s very fascinating and enlightening Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, takes the opposite approach. Erard, who lives in Austin and trained in linguistics at the University of Texas, focuses on those um’s and uh’s and er’s and like’s, “repeated words, repeated sounds or repaired (restarted) sentences,” and all the thousand and one meaningless voice interruptions that we routinely tune out of our everyday conversation.

Everyone makes them, even the most practiced speakers. They occur on the average once every 10 words.

The first thing you learn in this instructive book is that speech lapses are far from meaningless, but follow a regular pattern, like grammar. When we stumble over a noun, we replace it with another noun, or verb, or whatever. When we mix up sounds, they are usually from the same syllable of the words. Our slips conform to the sounds, syntax and words we intended to say, and therefore are often quite funny.

Erard’s book, “a work of applied blunderology,” is an entertaining history of attempts by scientists, linguists and especially Freud to connect what comes out of the mouth with what goes on in the mind. The “Freudian slip”—revealing some darker anxiety in the mind—turns out to be unfounded, however. Slips, although revealing, are not a pathway into the repressions of the mind. Quite the opposite.

Pauses in speech point to thinking, Erard says, “not, as has been previously thought, a lack in thinking, a gap between two thoughts, some psychic anxiety or embarrassment.” Pauses are part of a cycle of thinking and speaking.

Disfluencies—trips of the tongue, “repairs”—occur in normal preschool children around once every hundred words. In high school seniors, the least disfluent group, it goes down to four. As we age, the number goes up again (58).

The causes are the discrepancies between the planning and executing functions of the brain—between planning what we’re going to say, and saying it.

So it’s true: We can’t think and talk at the same time.

Men say “uh” and “um” much more often than women do, and also restart more sentences and repeat more words. Married couples blunder as often as strangers.

The most active person in a conversation makes the most blunders.

Disfluencies occur in every language—consistent of course with the grammar of that language—and even in presidents. Especially in presidents. The fame of our own national tongue tripper, and Erard’s fellow Texan, helped inspire this book.

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.

From the Wall Street Journal

That’s Not What I Meant to Say
By CHARLES HARRINGTON ELSTER
August 24, 2007; Page W4

THE other day my nine-year-old daughter was telling me a story, and at one point she couldn’t decide whether to say billions or bunches, so out popped a portmanteau word: “I’ve got binches,” she said, then giggled at her mistake.

To the casual observer that blooper is cute, but to Michael Erard, a journalist who specializes in writing about language, it is fodder for analysis. In “Um...,” his first book, which he describes as “a work of applied blunderology,” he argues that verbal blundering is natural, meaningful and “integral to language.”

Mr. Erard’s enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. He gets you wondering about blundering. While you’re reading “Um...” (and perhaps for a long while after) you’ll be on the qui vive for others’ slips and painfully aware of your own—which, Mr. Erard informs us, constitute a whopping 5% to 8% of the words you utter every day.

‘Blurps and Interruptions’

There are two main categories of blunders: slips of the tongue and “speech disfluencies.” A slip is “a momentary loss of control over speaking”; a disfluency is “one of the blurps and interruptions in what we think should be smoothly flowing talk.”
[Books]

Recounting the research of linguists and cognitive scientists in easygoing, anecdotal prose, Mr. Erard shows how “slips result from a mental plan gone awry, while disfluencies represent a delay or interruption in planning itself.” While we tend to notice slips of the tongue, and often make fun of them, we tend to ignore disfluencies (especially our own) unless they are salient or habitual.

Well-known slips include the malapropism, named after the character Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The Rivals,” and the spoonerism, named after the Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), the famously soapy-tongued warden of New College, Oxford.

A spoonerism is a reversal of the initial letters or syllables of words, as when Spooner reputedly toasted Queen Victoria: “Here’s to our queer old dean!” My favorite spoonerism is an intentional one attributed to Dorothy Parker: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”

A malapropism is a humorous confusion of words that sound alike, as when Curly of the Three Stooges says, “I resemble that remark!” One special type of malapropism is the eggcorn, a word someone uses incorrectly but believes to be correct, “a sort of ossified slip of the tongue” based on mishearing or mispronunciation: for all intensive purposes; when all is set and done. “Eggcorn” itself is an eggcorn for acorn.

Among the other common but lesser-known slips (linguists have documented as many as 50 kinds) are the “anticipation,” or “forward error” (a leading list for a reading list); the “perseveration,” or “backward error” (black bloxes for black boxes); and the inadvertent blend (my daughter’s binches).

The speech disfluencies, which are “far more frequent,” says Mr. Erard, comprise a host of “unsmooth moments”: pause fillers (uh and um), repeated words ("Will-will you marry me?"), repeated sounds ("B-b-but I just can’t"), prolonged vowels or syllables, and restarted or “repaired” sentences. I wish Mr. Erard had added one more type to his list: verbal tics (y’know, like, basically, I mean). Given the annoying frequency of such words and phrases, the omission is especially disappointing.

Never a Cigar

In a chapter on Freud and his eponymous slip, we learn that the man to whom a cigar was never just a cigar had a formidable intellectual rival, a Viennese philologist named Rudolf Meringer who painstakingly collected thousands of slips and in 1895 published a treatise about them that linguists today consider a seminal work.

To Freud, whose opinions on slips first appeared in an article published in 1901, any blunder, “however seemingly innocuous, hid a secret intention that could be unburied through investigation.” But to Meringer, a slip didn’t emanate from “some repressed psychic material.” His research led him to conclude that slips weren’t random, that they adhered to the basic rules of language, and that their source lay not in the speaker but in “the utterance contaminating itself.”

This dichotomy still lies at the heart of the debate about slips and disfluencies. Do they have “a mysterious, individual cause” or are they chiefly mechanical, occurring as “the brain shifts from planning to executing”?

“Um...” is filled with toothsome factlets. For example, tying down a person’s arm induces blunders while gesturing apparently reduces them. People talking on the phone and people with their hands in their pockets are more likely to be disfluent. In a chapter on presidential blundering, in which President Dubya of course figures prominently, we discover that Thomas Jefferson was “a verbal bungler with a lisp” and that Calvin Coolidge was “the first president with a policy against being quoted verbatim.”

Though Mr. Erard covers the spectrum of slips and stumbles with authority, he is less successful at telling us what they mean. This is not entirely his fault, because we still don’t know enough about how the brain works and, all too often, the blunderologists can’t seem to agree. “Um...” is well researched and at times penetrating, but it falls short of being definitive. We are still left wondering whether our slips reveal something profound about our nature and the nature of language or whether they are merely subliminal glitches, potholes that the brain runs over as it guides the tongue down the treacherous communication highway.

One thing about blunders is certain, though. Misspeaking, Mr. Erard shows persuasively, is normal, and “a verbal blunder is… an indelible mark of humanness.”

From the New York Times

By WILLIAM GRIMES

To the long list of everyday afflictions that includes dry, itchy skin and restless leg syndrome, add another: speech disfluency. Everyone suffers from it. As Michael Erard reckons it in “Um ... ,” his informal study of verbal stumbles and pratfalls, the average person will commit somewhere between 7 and 22 slips of the tongue each day and from two to four times a day will struggle, for an embarrassing length of time, to find the right word or name. It only gets worse. As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er.

What are we to make of this? Quite a lot, if you happen to be a linguist or Sigmund Freud. It was Freud who proposed, in “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” that seemingly random verbal errors and self-interruptions could be seen as uncensored signals flashed from the unconscious. Contemporary with Freud a handful of language scholars were tuning into the idea that verbal mistakes, examined closely enough, followed certain patterns and could shed light on the way language works.

Mr. Erard, a freelance journalist who has a master’s degree in linguistics, follows these two main lines of interpretation down through the years, describing the work of modern linguists and psychoanalysts fascinated by verbal pauses, fillers and errors and what they might mean. The short answer is that no one really knows. Take “um,” a recurrent speed bump on the communication highway. Some psychologists regard it as a power play, a warning to the listener not to jump in, because more speech is on the way. Others see it as an invitation to enter the conversation.

For linguists, on the other hand, the almighty “um” attracts interest because of its function. So do slips like “chlodium soride,” for “sodium chloride.” Both point to a brain working busily to plan the sentence ahead, segment by segment, like railroad workers laying track. The simplest explanation for all verbal mistakes, Mr. Erard writes, is that they occur “as the brain shifts from planning to executing or back again.” They also, most linguists agree, follow the structure of the language.

One of the most persuasive explanations cited by Mr. Erard is the “spreading activation theory” advanced by Gary Dell, a cognitive scientist at the University of Illinois. In Professor Dell’s view the brain, in speech mode, electrically activates linked words, sounds and meanings that occasionally overlap and produce not only errors like “every crook and nanny” but also conceptual reversals such as saying “open the door” when you mean “close the door,” a problem created because the idea of “openness” has registered on the brain and intruded on speech.

There is a strong social bias against verbal fillers in speech. Mr. Erard spends a great deal of energy trying to figure out why this is, and when it developed. The Greeks and Romans, who revered the art of rhetoric, had nothing to say about specific parts of speech that needed to be expunged. Although Shakespeare refers to “hums and ha’s,” sifting through etiquette manuals and public-speaking guides turns up scant evidence of a prohibition against ums, ers and uhs, which are profuse in the first recording of Thomas Edison’s voice, in 1888. Mr. Erard, rather ingeniously, traces the prohibition on um and other speech flaws to the advent of radio in the early 1920s. Mistakes were made. The president was not, as one newsman had it, “Hoobert Heever.” But announcers, ruthlessly eliminating every pause, hem and haw, quickly established an impossible standard for ordinary speakers to emulate in daily life. Mr. Erard unwittingly undercuts this perfectly plausible thesis by citing elocution books from the pre-radio era that make it quite clear that um and uh were already taboo when the airwaves started crackling with human speech.

“Um ... ” is less a work of “applied blunderology,” as Mr. Erard terms it, than a loose assortment of anecdotes, theories and data, thrown together in seemingly random fashion. Even at modest length, it is repetitive and padded. Kermit Schafer, the creator of the blooper franchise, gets his own chapter, for no particular reason, although it does include gems like “Also keeping an eye on the Woodstock Rock Festival was New York’s governor Rockin Nelsenfeller.”

When he ventures into social theory, Mr. Erard swings wildly. “People began to prefer umlessness in public speaking and conversation around the same time that they began to value order, organization, planning and efficiency in an increasingly complex and urbanizing society,” he writes. Maybe. On the other hand, the Romans, living in their complex, urban society, also valued these qualities but seem not to have minded “um” or whatever the Latin equivalent is.

Mr. Erard does remind us, usefully, that George W. Bush, who gets his own chapter, is neither more nor less blunder-prone than other politicians, despite gaffes like “misunderestimate,” “terriers and bariffs” and “I will not keep this nation hostile.” Consider the following from Al Gore: “Uh, I, I, my message is for the, the voters of the country. Uh, I ask for their support. I’m not taking a single vote for, for granted.”

There is a cure for the um problem. Apparently drinking helps. So do shorter sentences. “In other experiments,” Mr. Erard writes, “people speak more fluently when they’re threatened with electric shocks.” Some advice, then, to the candidates headed for the next round of presidential debates: Keep the answers short and punchy, chug a six-pack before setting foot on stage, and, when pressed, look for the nearest electrical outlet.

From the Deseret Morning News

by Dennis Lythgoe.

A verbal blunder is “a slip of the tongue, i.e., any moment when something we’ve planned to say somehow goes awry.”

Or it might be “a speech disfluency ... repeated sounds and words, fragments of words, restarted sentences and silent pauses.”

This according to “Um ... Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean,” by Michael Erard, who has academic degrees in linguistics and English.

“It is not,” he writes, “laughing, crying, shouting, sighing, panting, yawning, coughing, throat clearing, spitting, belching, hiccupping or sneezing.”

Erard became interested in the subject of verbal blunders during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush’s malapropisms were referred to as “abnormal” in media reports. Erard thought critics were too hard on Bush, because he believes all of us commit verbal blunders.

He is convinced that making mistakes in speech is not a sign of a lack of intelligence. It is often caused by anxieties — people repeat words and restart sentences if they’re nervous. Or they may simply be accidental.

Erard cites the Rev. William Archibald Spooner of Oxford University, who made outrageous verbal mistakes in the 19th century. He transposed words, thus creating the “spoonerism,” or simply “a spoo.”

One example was something he is supposed to have said to toast Queen Victoria at dinner: “Give three cheers for our queer old dean.” Once he welcomed a group of farmers as “noble tons of soil.” He cautioned some young missionaries against having “a half-warmed fish in their hearts.”

Another famous verbal mistake is the “Freudian Slip,” named after psychanalyst Sigmund Freud. For Freud, “the unconscious conveyed its own desires via verbal blunders.” Today, we use the term “Freudian Slip” to describe lapses that are “obscene or salacious.” Freud allowed no accidents in speech. He thought all of them were “willed by the dynamics of the unconscious.”

Most of us don’t believe that anymore, but we still have fun identifying what appears to be a “Freudian Slip” in conversation and then mocking the person who uttered it.

Erard gives an example from George W. Bush in a press conference, defending his decision to go to war in Iraq. Asserting that democracy was emerging, Bush said, “Who could have possibly envisioned an erectsh — an election in Iraq at this point in history?”

Because he corrected himself before finishing the word, his error is called “a repair.” An analyst might either say the comment was Freudian or it was accidental, because Bush anticipated the “r” in Iraq and the “l” in election.

Erard recounted a study by Bell Labs of 1,900 phone calls including 80,000 words and found that 25 percent of the words were “nonwords,” such as “um,” “uh,” “uh-huh,” etc. Another 10 percent consisted of laughter or profanity.

Age is apparently one reason for slips or problems of speech. One study found “a sharp decline in the size of a person’s active vocabulary after 70 years old, and between 74 and 78, people rapidly lose their ability to produce complex sentences.”

This is not a sign of the onset of Alzheimer’s, however — and it changes little between the age of 70 and 100, except that older people usually speak more slowly.

There are many fascinating studies and stories in this book, but most people can apparently take delight in understanding that verbal slips are not intellectual gaffes, nor do they suggest the unconscious desire to say something salacious.

The original review is here.

From the Savannah Morning News

by Theo Lippman, Jr.

Texas scholar-journalist Michael Erard has written a delightful book about the spoken word of yesterday, today and tomorrow, seen through the prism of “slips, stumbles and verbal blunders.”

“Um ...” has many pages in which the scholarship bogs you down. But it has more pages that are readable and enjoyable. You’ll chuckle, even laugh out loud. And learn a lot along the way.

For instance, Erard explores the verbal clues to the way aging affects your vocabulary and expression. He does so by comparing Ronald Reagan at age 73 in the 1984 presidential debate with Walter Mondale to his debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980.

In 1984, after being asked if he could function as president in a long, sleepless crisis night at his age, he drew laughter and good feelings when he answered that “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

“His wit was sharp as ever,” Erard writes. “But his language showed his age.” He based this on a study of both debates by a British neuropsychologist. The president made more slips of the tongue, had five times more pauses, uttered 15 fewer words per minute than 1980. To the Briton, those were “signs of mental disease.”

Erard also cites an American psycholinguist’s study, which indicated Reagan’s 1984 performance was normal aging, not the onset of disease. It also found that his active vocabulary diminished sharply, as it does for us all over 70.

Erard likes to use presidents to describe vocal missteps and shortcomings. For example, the ever popular “Freudian slip” - a slip of the tongue that substitutes some word or phrase from one’s unconsciousness, often salacious, for what the speaker meant to say.

President George W. Bush at a press conference about Iraqi elections came within a syllable of finishing something very, uh, intimate that I won’t detail in a family newspaper. If you must know, get the book and turn to page 49.

One of the book’s best anecdotes regarding president-speak: Dwight Eisenhower was preparing for a press conference in which his press secretary James Hagerty warned him he would face very touchy questions about a looming international crisis.

The president said, “Don’t worry, Jim, if that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.”

Eisenhower’s public speaking was lampooned by TV talk show comedians, as is Bush’s. There are so many of those in fact that Slate editor Jacob Weisberg coined a new word, “Bushisms.” But comedians and journalists often make verbal blunders, as do you and I.

Modern technology has changed the way politicians are quoted. I was a Washington correspondent when few reporters used a cassette recorder. After gang questioning some Congressman or Cabinet member at the Capitol, the attending press would get together for something like this: “Did he say ... ?” “No, I’ve got ...” “I didn’t hear that ...” “I thought he said ...”

Finally: “Could we all agree he said ...?” And we always could.

Today almost every reporter can quote accurately from tape or disc, including all sorts of ums, ers, and factual mistakes, etc.

Also today, the new technology means that everybody with a home telephone regularly has “conversations” with um-free robots, who direct you with questions and such as “if ... say yes.”

But that’s changing.

Erard closes his book with this: “Telemarketers used to leave prerecorded messages on my answering machine like, ‘Hi! This is Bob Jones, and I’m here to tell you about a great new home equity loan!’ “

Now the robot messages sound more like, “‘Hey, I uh, I’m sorry I missed you, but uh ...’ “

Erard writes, “I keep listening longer than I used to.”

The next step? Think Hal, the murderous computer in “2001.”

Note: read the original piece here.

From BookPage

by Thane Tierney

Oops, I did it again!

It happens about every 10 words—the ums, uhs, you knows—the verbal placeholders we use while our minds race ahead of our tongues, the verbal gaffes like substituting “interweb” for “Internet” or replacing “loofah” with “falafel” (as commentator Bill O’Reilly is rather famously alleged to have done in a telephone call).

Armed with a master’s degree in linguistics and a doctorate in English, author Michael Erard lumps a variety of faux pas under the heading of “disfluencies” in Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, $24.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9780375423567), which makes them sound more remarkable than most of them really are. Our verbal miscues are plentiful and inevitable, but only occasionally riotous or ruinous. If we’re really lucky, like the notorious Rev. William Spooner, not only will actual blunders (such as exalting God as a “shoving leopard”) bring us fame, but invented ones such as “a camel passing through the knee of an idol” will be ascribed to us, enhancing our renown.

Viennese professor Rudolf Meringer’s famed battles with Sigmund Freud over the cause of Fehlleistung (literally “faulty performance,” now widely known as “Freudian slips”) are documented in detail here, as is the cross-cultural nature of the vocal glitch. In the Wichita tongue, for instance, the word kaakiri, or “something,” takes the place of “uh,” and similar “verbal” tics can be detected even in sign language. From Mrs. Malaprop, whose penchant for garbled speech in the 1775 play the rivals has given us the catchall word for verbal blunders, to President George W. Bush, whose so-called “dubyaspeak” has given rise to such howlers as 2004’s “This is a historic moment in history, as far as I’m concerned,” Erard deftly picks his way through a junkyard of spoken debris to inform, enlighten and entertain in equal
measure.

Verbal blunderologists swarm among us like birdwatchers in spring, and we are all unwitting targets for their nets. So be forewarned: Um.. is a mystery you won’t want to hiss, and if you do, may sod rest your goal.

From the New York Times Book Review

by Christine Kenneally

In “Um...,” Michael Erard brings together two of humanity’s signature traits: using language and messing things up. The way we misspeak is endlessly interesting, but not because it is a sign of bad habits or unconscious feelings. Rather, interruptions and mistakes result from one of the fundamental properties of language, its linearity. Because speech is timebound and words can come only one after the other, the way we stall, stumble and start again provides clues to the way we render thought with sound. Indeed, what is stilted, stuttered and slipped on illuminates how we retrieve words from memory, how we plan ahead of speech, how we unite meaning and intonation in real time, and how we acquire language in the first place.

On his enjoyable tour of linguistic mishaps, Erard, a freelance journalist based in Austin, Tex., takes in everything from robotics to the federal government’s transcription service, Aristotle to contemporary public speaking coaches. I was especially glad to learn about Toastmasters International’s World Championship of Public Speaking and about Kermit Schafer, who created the TV blooper empire. Naturally, Erard discusses the Rev. William Archibald Spooner, the 19th-century Oxford don famous for his verbal transpositions (“You have hissed all my mystery lectures”). While it’s no great surprise to discover that his errors have been exaggerated, it is curious to hear that in fact some of his colleagues claimed to have heard few spoonerisms (as his characteristic error has come to be known), while his own daughter said she never heard any.

The first systematic collections of verbal errors were compiled by Arab scholars, beginning with “The Errors of the Populace” by al-Kisali (who died in the year 805). In modern times, clever researchers like Anne Cutler of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and David Fay of Verizon Laboratories have shown that when someone accidentally says “tambourines” for “trampolines,” the wrong word doesn’t just sound like the intended one, it almost always belongs to the same grammatical category.

Investigating how talking gets tripped up is rewarding because it reveals the dynamic nature of the human mind, but also because people get so upset about it. Erard surveys the public-speaking professionals and self-righteous amateurs who see linguistic hesitation and clumsiness as a bad habit, if not a sign of moral turpitude or compromised thought. Imagine seeking help from the impatient psychiatrist who complained in a 1959 book that the “moaning-like ‘er ... er ... er ...’ is annoying, draws the conversation out to great length and makes the listener, who is far ahead of the speaker, wait. ... One can say that whenever this mannerism is used for one reason or another there is anxiety present.”

It’s hard putting people who view “er” as a personal failing side by side with scientists interested in what real speech says about cognition, and “Um...” at times suffers from a lack of synthesis. Erard toggles between being the reporter who sees errors as integral to language and the writer who dislikes linguistic imperfection. He works so hard to convince us errors are normal that it’s jarring to then find him bemoaning the fact that they’re impossible to avoid.

Speaking of missteps, “Um...” has its share, and they stem largely from Erard’s exuberance. Erard repeats without any apparent irony one linguist’s quip that “slip science” has succeeded in part because it gives socially awkward linguists something to do at a dinner party. Worse, he says of the linguist Victoria Fromkin (who wrote the first paper arguing that slips of the tongue were relevant to linguists) that “it is virtually impossible to have an empirical or theoretical discussion about language or speech without addressing” her. Fromkin was a fascinating character, but this is not remotely true.

Inevitably, Erard addresses the accident-prone speech of the current president of the United States. Instead of merely cataloging George W. Bush’s gaffes, he accuses the media that have pounced on them of misunderstanding language. Bush was “a canary in the linguistic coal mine,” Erard writes, and the mockery he has endured for his tin tongue reflects “simmering anxieties over ... language, citizenship, patriotism and belonging.” He cites a few statistics about the rise of bilingualism, but otherwise fails to make his case. Little of the science Erard has previously laid out informs this discussion, which instead relies on the loose notion that misspoken language is somehow more authentic than slick talk. Besides, as Erard acknowledges, no one has worked out whether Bush makes more verbal errors than other presidents, or indeed than other people.

When you criticize people who don’t talk the way you do, Erard writes, you “smear” larger groups of people, including speakers of English as a second language, stutterers and the elderly. “Liberals shouldn’t talk about speaking this way,” he declares. “It contradicts how they work to include everybody and make sure that everyone has equal opportunity.” But finding it alarming, endearing or just really, really funny when the leader of the free world says “misunderestimate” is hardly denying him equal opportunity. And sometimes the laughter is not even partisan, it’s just human.

From the Austin American Statesman

by Ana Cantú

Er, how should I put this? Well, uh, everyone does it. Says “um,” I mean.

Since Homo sapiens developed the power of speech, the species’ collective tongue has been tying itself in knots. In “Um ... : Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” Austin writer Michael Erard traces the history of what he calls “applied blunderology” from ancient Greek rhetoric to the modern political stump speech. He deftly weaves complex linguistic theory with engaging examples of everyday errors and bloopers, which have been a popular form of entertainment for generations. The growth of mass media — from the early days of radio to the creation of YouTube — has raised the profiles of both the verbal blunder and the blunderers themselves.

Because errors and gaffes crop up in every language, spoken and signed, Erard’s philosophy is a twist on Descartes: I speak, therefore I blunder. And, oh, do we blunder. From spoonerisms ("a well-boiled icicle") and malapropisms ("misunderestimate") to Freudian slips, humans are estimated to garble one out of every 10 words. The blunders are strikingly regular in every language. In English, for example, when a speaker makes a mistake it follows regular patterns. You might say, “That’s the cake on the icing,” swapping a noun for a noun. But you wouldn’t say, “That’s the on icing the cake,” switching a noun and a preposition. Why? Linguists see language as a frame filled with slots; words and sounds only fit in slots designed for them.

Erard was inspired to write “Um” after the 2000 presidential campaign and studied the speech of presidents since Calvin Coolidge, who was in office as radio sales exploded. TV wasn’t kind to President Eisenhower, known for his rambling, and the Internet allows critics to keep a running tally of Bush-isms. However, in President Bush’s case, studies found that his slip-ups made him seem more genuine. Often, speech that is too smooth is seen as suspect. As long as the meaning transcends the message, listeners are willing to forgive something as inconsequential as a few “uhs.”

From the Chicago Tribune

by Nathan Bierma

We look down on “um,” “uh” and other speech malfunctions, but they’re integral parts of language, says Michael Erard in his new book “Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean” (Knopf, $24.95).

“Our ordinary speech is notoriously fragmented, and all sorts of verbal blunders swim through our sentences like bubbles in champagne,” Erard writes. His term “verbal blunders” covers both “slips of the tongue,” when we flub a word that we know, and “speech disfluencies,” when “uh” and “um” invade our sentences and stop them in their tracks. Verbal blunders happen as often as once every 10 spoken words, by some measurements, for a total of more than 1,000 per person, per day.

Erard said media coverage of George W. Bush’s flubs during the 2000 presidential campaign launched him into the field of study he calls “applied blunderology.”

It was Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalysis gave us the idea of the “Freudian slip”—saying a wrong word that supposedly reveals what you’re really thinking about, like saying “had sex” instead of “had success.” But Erard tells the story of linguist Ruldolf Meringer, a contemporary and critic of Freud’s, who insisted that slips were mostly sound mix-ups, not psychological revelations.

Meringer said sound slips can be “forward errors,” when we insert a sound too early, like “fish those shingles” instead of “fix those shingles” (anticipating the “sh” sound), or “backward errors,” when we repeat a sound from an earlier word, like “phone flan” instead of “phone plan” (repeating the “ph” sound).

Today, scientists tend to agree with Meringer’s views that slips are mere malfunctions, but the idea of the Freudian slip as a revelation lives on.

While slips of the tongue are the most famous kind of verbal blunders, disfluencies such as “um” are more common—and, Erard says, more interesting.

“They happen because talking is an activity that takes place in time, and disfluencies are signs of the inevitable friction between thinking and speaking,” Erard writes. He says that selecting and speaking from the thousands of words in our vocabularies at lightning speed is a feat that’s almost impossible to execute flawlessly.

“Grabbing these words, one every four hundred milliseconds on average, and arranging them in sequences that are edited and reviewed [by us] for grammar and appropriateness before they’re spoken requires a symphony of neurons working quickly and precisely,” he writes.

And so Erard argues that we should see “um” and “uh” as natural byproducts of the complicated process of speaking—not necessarily signs of low intelligence, anxiety or deception. (Disfluencies may mark anxiety or deception only when their rate increases in a person’s speech, not merely by occurring at all, Erard says.)

“In general, anyone who thinks or acts at the same time as they speak, especially under pressure, will blunder,” Erard concludes. “They are, in the term of the actuarial tables, ‘normal accidents.’”

Still, Erard says, studying verbal blunders has made him more careful in his own speech.

“Now, I speak slowly, in a way that some would call saturnine,” he writes. “I make my points, but I take my time getting there.”

Note: the original piece is here.

From the Minnesota Star Tribune

by Roger K. Miller

If one specialized corner of late-19th-century Viennese history had proceeded differently, we might today be saying “Meringer slip” rather than “Freudian slip.” Rudolf Meringer was a professor of philology whose study and theory of slips of the tongue—he collected 8,800 of them—preceded Sigmund Freud’s interest in them and differed from Freud’s radically.

To ur-psychiatrist Freud (whose “slip” coinage did not become commonplace until the 1950s), verbal blunders conveyed the true desires of the unconscious; every slip or gaffe, however seemingly innocuous, hid a secret intention, usually sexual. Meringer, on the other hand, used slips to get a handle on language, not on the self. “He saw that slips are not random, but are patterned according to the structure of the language,” writes Michael Erard in “Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.”

Of course, sex trumps philology every time. Freud prevailed and became known as the “father of psychoanalysis” (a subject Meringer scorned as “a caricature of science” and a “concocted faddishness"). But, as Erard points out, Meringer ("the first blunderologist") is having the last word as Freud and psychoanalysis come under increasing criticism. Research following Meringer steadily demolishes Freud’s notions as to the significance of verbal blunders.

Erard, a journalist and linguistics specialist, calls this, his first book, “a work of applied blunderology,” asking why verbal blunders happen, what they mean and why they matter. There are countless types of blunders, but the author divides them into two categories: slips of the tongue (such as “I have caked a bake"), and speech disfluencies—fillers such as “uh” and “um,” repeated words, repeated sounds or repaired (and restarted) sentences.

The average normal speaker of English, Erard says, makes seven to 22 slips of the tongue a day, and has two to four moments a day struggling to find the right word or name. About 5 to 8 percent of the words normal speakers say each day involve disfluencies.

Meringer and others after him point out that blunders are integral to language, in the way a window is integral to a wall. Erard compares them to the actuarial term “normal accidents.”

Because errors occur according to the rules and patterns of a language, an English-speaker’s slip comes out something like “chlodium soride,” not “sochlo rideium.” No conclusive link has yet been found between disfluency patterns and personality traits. “Uh,” for example, is not a sign of anxiety.

The prescriptive tastes of society—the desire for what might be called “an aesthetic of umlessness”—diverge from the biological reality of language, Erard says. The ancient Vedic tradition has it that “om” is the primordial sound of the universe, but Erard wonders if it might more likely be “um.” According to a Dutch language expert, “uh” is the only word/sound universal across languages.

The book is entertaining as well as informative. The author has a good time attending a convocation of Toastmasters, who do strive, cheerfully, for “umlessness.” He chronicles the millions of dollars that Kermit Schafer made off radio and TV bloopers; President Bush’s oral blunders, which even some linguists do not find intolerable, and controversial linguistic autocrat Noam Chomsky, who declares slips unworthy of study.

Erard concludes that disfluency is normal, that rules for “good speaking” fly in the face of biological facts and that trying to communicate without disfluencies may be more distracting than it’s worth. “Verbal blunders do not mean any more, in themselves, than what we attribute to them,” he writes.

However, this book about oral blunders contains a few written ones. “A slip of the tongue is an inadvertent accident,” Erard writes. We might add, an “inadvertent accident” is a redundancy, as is “inadvertent mistake.”

Then there is this: “With its broad boulevards and monumental buildings, Vienna did not seem to be a city where small events like slips of the tongue would be noticed.” Really? Is there a physical environment ideally conducive to observing such things? Calcutta, perhaps?

All in all, though, this is a commendable, well-written and fluent book about disfluencies.

Note: you can read Miller’s original piece here.

From The New York Observer

by Jesse Wegman

At a weekly briefing early in his first term, President Calvin Coolidge noticed a reporter taking notes as he spoke.

“Are you writing down in shorthand what I say?” Coolidge inquired, according to a White House stenographer.

“Yes, sir,” the reporter replied.

“Now I don’t think that is right,” Coolidge said. “I don’t object to you taking notes as to what I say, but I don’t quite throw my communications to the conference into anything like finished style or anything that perhaps would naturally be associated with a presidential utterance.”

Weren’t those the days?

The advent of radio and television raised the stakes—and lowered the standards—on both sides of the podium, explains Michael Erard in Um … , his engaging but meandering analysis of the mistakes we make when we speak—what he calls “applied blunderology.”

Mr. Erard was inspired by, and dedicates a full chapter to, the intense scrutiny accorded President George W. Bush’s frequent tussles with English. He places this scrutiny in the context of our increasingly multilingual society and its “simmering anxieties over the connections among language, citizenship, patriotism and belonging.” Fair enough, but “misunderestimate” is also just funny.

This is one of those language books that you think is going to change the way you listen to people (a Note to the Reader warns as much)—and yet I’ve become no more attuned to the ums of the world than I was before. Perhaps this wouldn’t surprise Mr. Erard, who admits that the science of blunderology has always been hindered by the simple fact that our brains screen out the vast majority of both our own and others’ slips. People make one to two errors per thousand words, yet they report noticing only about one a week.

Mr. Erard breaks our blunders down into two general categories: slips of the tongue (“cuff of coffee”) and disfluencies (“um” and “uh”). While slips get almost all the attention in the media and in literature, disfluencies are far more common; by one count, they make up 40 percent of all speech errors. In both cases, the error occurs because the brain is engaged simultaneously in planning and executing. In other words, you’re most likely to blunder when you are trying to think and speak at the same time. (President Bush is, apparently, a very deep thinker.)

Mr. Erard traces the history of blunderology to ancient Egypt, but things don’t really get going until the 19th century, when the Reverend William Spooner at Oxford University was credited with making the distinctive slips—jawfully loined, kinkering congs—that now bear his name. Although virtually all of the most well-known spoonerisms are fabricated, Mr. Erard points out, they nevertheless reflect predictable patterns of the verbal slip: We tend to mess up the first syllable of a word, the stress-carrying syllable, and the initial sound. He also links the fascination with spoonerisms to the rise of the industrial era, when technologies such as the railroad were growing in size and complexity. “In these circumstances,” Mr. Erard notes, “small human errors had larger consequences.”

Freud, naturally, gets his due here: To him, the verbal slip was evidence of an unconscious desire—sexual or otherwise—attempting to express itself. But Mr. Erard gives equal time to another, less famous Viennese professor, Rudolf Meringer, who gathered slips by the thousands and rebutted Freud’s theories ruthlessly and publicly. Meringer believed speech errors said more about the nature of language itself than about the person speaking—and although he never attained the notoriety of Freud, his ideas are much closer to today’s understanding of verbal slips.

A journalist with an M.A. in linguistics and a Ph.D. in English, Michael Erard is clearly enthusiastic about his subject, but he’s given himself a dissertation’s worth of ground to cover. The barrage of studies he cites quickly becomes a blur, especially as the terms and theories change again and again. I would nevertheless have welcomed a brief foray into neuroscience, given how much we’ve learned about the biology and mechanics of the brain even in the past decade.

His main point, however, is an empathic one, and well taken: Verbal blunders are an integral part of speaking—“normal accidents,” as he puts it—and we are all guilty much more than we think.

So what of our beleaguered blunderer in chief? Mr. Erard argues that it’s unfair to single out Mr. Bush as a clumsy speaker, and provides as evidence the following quote: “Uh, I, I, my message is for the, the voters of the country. Uh, I ask for their support. I’m not taking a single vote for, for granted.” The context was the 2000 presidential campaign, and the speaker was Al Gore.

The original review is here.

From Texas Monthly

Here’s a Q&A with me in Texas Monthly.

An excerpt:

Has George W. Bush earned his reputation as a verbal stumblebum?

George W. Bush has certainly earned his reputation as someone who is inarticulate and unable to lead with his language. But in terms of true speech errors, his reputation as a verbal blunderer, someone who was to language what Bill Clinton was to marital fidelity, was thrust upon him. A couple of factors were important: The faster news cycle meant that organizations needed more content, which means he was quoted more. Campaigns with strong message discipline make any deviation more informative, hence more valuable to journalists. Journalists and their audiences were in a mood for the verbatim. Dan Quayle, who was already the country’s linguistic punching bag, quit the race. So when Bush made a number of choice slips of the tongue very early on, he walked into a perfect storm.

Are people overly-concerned about what their verbal tics might reveal?

I think they don’t know much about what their tics do reveal. The disfluencies are pretty good indicators of states—emotional states, momentary responses to situations, mental load. But they’re not reliable indicators of traits—personality, intelligence, moral values.

From The Texas Observer

June 29, 2007 — Books and the Culture
Applied Blunderology
by Steven G. Kellman

Charged by God to tell old Pharaoh, “Let my people go,” Moses tried to shirk the chore. In The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston, who later talked thousands into joining the National Rifle Association, played the leader of the Israelites as a fountain of grandiloquence. In contrast to Heston (who also supplied the voice of Yahweh), the biblical Moses was a rather shabby orator. “I am not a man of words,” he tells God in Exodus 4:10. “Tongue-tied am I.” Rejecting his servant’s lame excuse, the deity dispatches Moses to the Egyptian court, but lets him take along brother Aaron to serve as spokesperson.

Politics in the United States offers abundant evidence that eloquence is not requisite for election. No one gets into office by overestimating the American voter’s hunger for clarity, logic, and truth. Reporting the passing of President Warren G. Harding in 1923, e.e. cummings observed: “The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.” Dwight Eisenhower, famous for syntactical rambles, appealed to class resentment of verbal poise when he railed against the Truman administration: “We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.” To prove he was a man of the people and not a privileged scion of the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy, George Herbert Walker Bush dropped the g’s in his gerunds. His son, who declared that, “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream,” dropped the appearance of coherence.

Faux populism demands that leaders dangle modifiers and yoke subjects to disagreeable verbs at least as often as the rest of us. And as Michael Erard points out, disfluencies—interruptions in speech—are as common as, uh, y’know, like, well ... kudzu. According to one study, telephone conversations average 8.83 disfluencies per 100 words. While Erard’s name suggests he was born to write about errata, his Ph.D. in linguistics from UT-Austin certifies he was trained for it. In Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, Erard, an Observer contributor, offers “a work of applied blunderology.” His book is a detailed and diverting survey of malapropisms, spoonerisms, stutters, solecisms, and other gaffes that clutter our speech. For Erard, to stammer is human, and verbal blunders are in fact “an indelible mark of humanness.” No computer or chimpanzee ever said, “I know it’s hard to put food on your family.” It was George W. Bush, and Erard, who writes in praise of folly, is remarkably tolerant toward the bumbler in chief.

A Bronx cheer to Cicero’s De Oratore, the classical treatise on how to speak well, Um ... is a study and celebration of how speech is botched. An appendix lists dozens of verbal stumbles, including repetitions, malaphors (“hit the nail right on the nose”), tip of the tongue amnesia, consonant reversals (“cake a bake”), perseveration (“black bloxes”), and filled pauses (“uh”). Erard is interested not just in mangled language, but also how perceptions of defective rhetoric have changed over the centuries. Being uptight about articulation is, he argues, a modern mania. He contends that expectations of flawless discourse are relatively recent, that it took the advent of gramophones and radios to turn speech into an object of appraisal. Hemming and hawing repudiate the hygiene of industrialized culture, and um is like a vibrant slum that defies urban planning. “People began to prefer umlessness in public speaking and conversation,” Erard observes, “around the same time they began to value order, organization, planning, and efficiency in an increasingly complex and urbanizing society.” The useful cog in a bureaucratic wheel never misspoke. In the brave new world of perfectly formulated phrases, spluttering strikes a blow against fascism.

A connoisseur of fumbles, Erard has a professional incentive to encourage their occurrence. “As unavoidable as they are ineradicable,” he notes, “verbal blunders are rich with meaning.” Yet he is less interested in devising his own interpretations of the gaffe than in reviewing how other specialists have squeezed meaning out of linguistic lemons. He profiles the rare species of blunderologist, men and women who eavesdrop on conversations to compile lists of slips for analysis. One, Jeri Jaeger, shadowed her three children from infancy into adolescence, noting every time they said something odd, such as “beek-a-poo” and “I want my blaceret.” Such goofs shine a light on how language is acquired and how it works.

The father of modern blunderology, according to Erard, was Rudolf Meringer, a Viennese professor whose 1889 Misspeaking and Misreading categorized 8,800 verbal slips he amassed by monitoring conversations of friends, relatives, students, and strangers. When Sigmund Freud, in his 1904 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, applied psychology to the genesis of verbal gaffes, Meringer argued that misstatements are a more reliable guide to how language, rather than the mind, works. More Meringerian than Freudian, Erard admires the work of numerous later linguists. He is particularly impressed by the contributions of UCLA linguist Victoria Fromkin to slip science.

Following the formula of popular nonfiction for nonspecialists, Erard makes stories out of studies, traveling to the offices of blunderologists to interview them. Jerry Giorgio, a retired New York City homicide detective, tells him how suspects’ verbal miscues provide crucial information. In Chicago, corporate consultant David Zulawski explains what blunders during an interview indicate about an employee. At Stanford, Arnold Zwicky describes his research on “eggcorns”—malapropisms such as “tow the line,” “exercise regiment,” and “for all intensive purposes,” based on misunderstanding a word or idiom. In Shanghai, Erard visits Saybot, a company whose software helps Chinese avoid flawed English.

In the book’s liveliest section, Erard recounts his visit to Reno for the annual convention of Toastmasters International, an organization with 200,000 members in 180 countries. Founded in 1924 by self-help guru Ralph Smedley and dedicated to personal improvement through public speaking, Toastmasters represents the ultimate in what Erard calls the “aesthetic of umlessness,” which demands the elimination of verbal flaws as if they were vile habits. The highlight of the Toastmasters convention is billed as the “World Series of public speaking, the Olympics of oratory, the final bout for the heavyweight title of World Champion of Public Speaking.” Accompanied by former champ David Brooks of Austin, Erard perversely listens for gaffes and is gratified to find them. He takes pleasure in recounting the career of Kermit Schafer, who made a fortune catering to public hunger for hearing someone else misspeak. The slips that Schafer collected and circulated, through records, radio, TV, and books, entertained the nation and established him, long before his death in 1979, as “the king of bloopers.”

Collecting bloopers today seems a bit quaint, like collecting orange crate labels. Though slip science slides on, why is Um ... appearing now? The subtext—and pretext—of the book is that in 2007 you don’t need a blunderologist to tell you that the most powerful man in the world is a gaffe factory. Erard explains that he began his project out of fascination “with how George W. Bush’s speech was portrayed, even fetishized, by the media and other observers.” Erard titles his penultimate chapter, a discussion of Bush’s verbal bungles, “President Blunder.” While quoting several of Bush’s egregious bloopers, Erard contends that other public figures—Dan Quayle, Bush père, even Thomas Jefferson—also mangled English. He paints the 43rd president as a victim of changing expectations by citizens who average seven to 22 slips of the tongue a day. While supporting standards of excellence in public discourse, he asks us to chill out, to accept slips as normal. The final words of Um ... ask that we “not only forgive our blunders but enjoy them.”

Joy isn’t exactly the result when Bush proclaims: “I don’t care what the polls say. I don’t. I’m doing what I think what’s wrong.” We are more attentive to miscues by the president than by other mortals. Yogi Berra is said to have said, “I didn’t really say everything I said.” Like Berra, Bush has become a repository of apocryphal gaffes, but he has uttered enough real ones on the record to embarrass anyone who values clarity and truth. When Berra erred, a game could be lost; a blunder by a president bears a higher potential cost. During Elizabeth II’s recent U.S. visit, Bush recalled, “You’ve helped our nation celebrate our bicentennial in 1776.” That was a failure to communicate. But when the man in charge confuses Slovenia and Slovakia, refers to Africa as “a nation of incredible disease,” and comments on the balance of trade with: “More and more of our imports come from overseas,” we have to wonder how that affects policy.

In the 1976 film Bedazzled, a character with a severe speech impediment struggles for agonizing moments to express a thought. “Well, that’s easy for you to say,” replies Peter Cook. It is not easy for us to listen. Sometimes stumbling in a sentence can be as refreshingly natural as a child’s belch during a stuffy sermon. But the bloopers that Bush, a graduate of Andover, Yale, and Harvard, emits betray a blend of ignorance and insouciance. They are not refreshing, even if natural. President Blunder is farting at the world.

Steven G. Kellman, a professor in the department of English, Classics, and Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was recently awarded the National Book Critic Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

From Kirkus Reviews

It’s eminently normal in speech to slip and blunder and self-correct and elide and, um, well, like, you know…

Texas-based journalist Erard summarizes the history of scholarly and popular interest in verbal slips and offers some disinterested insight into the current passion for parsing (and reproving) our president’s speech. After telling us his analysis is “a work of applied blunderology,” the author zips back in time to introduce William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), the Oxford don whose legendary—and in some cases apocryphal—blunders gave us spoonerisms ("queer old dean” instead of “dear old queen"). Erard moves on to explain Freudian slips, declaring that slips are “about as ubiquitous as ants at a picnic” in the speech of even the most fluent and educated. The average person commits about one blunder per thousand spoken words, with the very young and the very old being somewhat more prone to error. Much of what Erard learned from research and from the many interviews he conducted is counterintuitive. Nervous people do not say “um” more than calm people, and such pauses actually are signs of thinking, not a lack of it. Pure fluency, even in prepared remarks, is virtually impossible. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is “A Brief History of ‘Um’.” The author perused books on public speaking all the way back to Aristotle and found no condemnations of “um” and its dilatory relatives until fairly recently; he believes radio’s advent in the 1920s prepared the way for our current insistence on verbal perfection. Erard examines our subsequent fondness for bloopers and outtakes, retreats a bit to deplore—uh, explore—malapropisms and even finds time for a nifty allusion to Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.” His chapter on President Bush examines how Dubya’s supporters and detractors variously view his slips.

A lascinating fook at yet another revealing instance of human imperfection.

From Publisher’s Weekly

Journalist and language expert Erard believes we can learn a lot from our mistakes. He argues that the secrets of human speech are present in our own proliferating verbal detritus. Erard plots a comprehensive outline of verbal blunder studies throughout history, from Freud’s fascination with the slip to Allen Funt’s Candid Camera. Smoothly summarizing complex linguistic theories, Erard shows how slip studies undermine some well-established ideas on language acquisition and speech. Included throughout are hilarious highlight reels of bloopers, boners, Spoonerisms, malapropisms and “eggcorns.” The author also introduces interesting people along the way, from notebook-toting, slip-collecting professors to the devoted members of Toastmasters, a public speaking club with a self-help focus. According to Erard, the “aesthetic of umlessness” is a relatively new development in society originating alongside advents in mechanical reproduction, but it may be on its way out already. Take President Bush, who exemplifies that “the quirky casual, whether it is intentional or spontaneous, can inspire more trust than the slick and polished.” Erard closes by examining our own propensity toward verbal missteps, demonstrating how the interpretation of blunders is inextricable from social expectations. While Erard’s conclusion that meaning is socially and historically embedded may not be unfamiliar, his work challenges the reader to think about his or her own speech in an entirely new way.

Um... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean