Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Hardcover)

by Michael Erard (Author)
Key Phrases: verbal blunderer, verbal blunders, more disfluent, Some Facts About Verbal Blunders, Well Spoken, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers 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. (Aug.)
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Review
Praise for Um . . .

“Some people are bird watchers and learn a great deal about the birds they watch. Michael Erard watches word botchers and, in the process, enriches our experience of what language is about and what makes us human. After reading Um…, you'll never hear the thud and blunder of everyday speech in the same way.”
–Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English

“Who'd have thought that a book called Um could be a page-turner? But Michael Erard's investigtions of "applied blunderology" come to something more than the familiar catalogues of verbal slips and gaffes from the high and the low. It's also a fascinating meditation on why blunders happen, and what they tell us about language and ourselves. At its deepest level,  Um is an exercise in the zen of attention, which tunes us in to the revealing noises and pauses that we spend most of our time tuning out.”
–Geoffrey Nunberg, NPR commentator

“A lascinating fook at yet another revealing instance of human imperfection.”
–Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Included troughout are hilarious highlight reeks of bloopers, boners, spoonerisms, malapropisms, and 'eggcorns'... His work challenges the reader to think about his or her own speech in an entirely new way."
–Publishers Weekly


From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423567
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423567
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #98,255 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better Thinking Through Errors, August 30, 2007

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Optical illusions are fascinating, because we all, at some level, think that seeing is believing, and are amazed to find in how many ways our eyes can be fooled. They are not just amusements, however; in the past few decades, neurological researchers have used the mistaken impressions such illusions give us to look deeply into the parts of our brains that process visual data. The neuronal machinery that makes the errors thereby reveals what it is silently doing when it is doing its usual error-free processing. Similarly, over the past few decades, speech errors have been harnessed to help understand the almost infinitely complex process it takes to make a sentence. That is one of the fascinating points in _Um... : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean_ (Pantheon) by Michael Erard. Erard, who has an academic background in linguistics and English, is a freelance writer who has looked into what you might think of as a pretty limited field even for professor types. People say "um" a lot, and they mix up their word pronunciations and sentence structure. We generally ignore such flaws, no matter how universal they may be, and in fact we may be programmed to ignore them. Still, if they are universal, they must be mean something. Erard has wandered all over to visit researchers who are each looking deeply into a specific area of linguistic mistakes and bringing forth a new understanding of how language works. The result is an entertaining book that can only make readers appreciate how complicated spoken language is, and admire how it usually goes fluently.

What do all these "ums" mean? Not anxiety. One of the earliest products of "disfluency research" was that the number of filler words has no correlation with the level of anxiety. It might be that "um" isn't an error, but a means that a speaker has of signaling a listener that a delay is coming, perhaps a hunt for an important word or concept, and in this way the speaker is inviting the listener to keep up with not only the stream of thought but the process of thinking. If "um" plays a linguistic role, then perhaps it is not really an error, and Erard documents that there was no campaign to eliminate "um" until the early twentieth century. The book's subtitle hints that there is more to it than just "um", and there is much more, starting with an amusing portrait of the 19th-century Oxford don Rev. William Archibald Spooner who was famous for transposing word sounds. "You have tasted a worm", he is supposed to have said, when he wished to say, "You have wasted a term." Many of his supposed sayings he didn't say at all, and many of his colleagues said they never heard any. People have made vast lists of spoonerisms (as they have of every other sort of verbal error), and the lists reflect that something orderly is going on even in such a verbal pratfall. In verbal slips, we are more likely to fluff the initial sound, for instance, and the initial syllable of a word, and the syllable that gets the emphasis. If we misspeak and insert a wrong word, it is not likely to be a nonsense word, and we almost always insert a noun for a noun, a verb for a verb, and so on. Freudian slips are covered here, but researchers are demonstrating that these mistakes are a linguistic, rather than a neurotic, manifestation.

Erard covers a pleasing range of language gaffs, and part of the appeal of the book is that everyone will recognize the errors he describes. Erard covers the career of Kermit Schaefer, who did not invent the term "blooper", but who collected enough funny radio and television mistakes to became the "King of Bloopers", and to make a fortune on how much we enjoy the amusing verbal mistakes of people who use language professionally. He tells of the research of Stanford's Arnold Zwicky on "eggcorns", a term which unites "egg" and "corn" for a malapropism for "acorn". Like "very close veins" for "varicose veins", these are slips of the tongue that have become ossified so that the individual using the term thinks it is correct. In Shanghai, Erard visits the company Saybot which makes software to help Chinese keep from mangling English. An enjoyable penultimate chapter is wickedly called "President Blunder", but is actually pretty gentle on the famous gaffes of George W. Bush. No one knows, for instance, if the president who is famous for such sayings as "You're working hard to keep food on your family" actually makes more verbal errors than any of his predecessors, or more than other people in general. Erard points out that it is fundamentally wrong to criticize "how smart or competent or moral a person is because he or she doesn't speak like you do" but on the other hand it is wrong to praise the authenticity of error-prone speech when the excellence of error-free speech is an ideal (if unattainable) goal. The surprise is that if we magically managed to eliminate all our errors of speaking, we would lose this window into the mysterious inner workings of our capacity for language.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, Modern Scholarship, September 27, 2007

By	John S. Baker "Chela 01" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This excellent book separates itself from the 'tut tut' school of writing. If you like "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", you probably will not like this book. "Um..." is short on indignation and rich in facts.

Erard, the author, makes his case that verbal errors are part of the language. Just yesterday, I heard a BBC commentary state that 'this is a bridge we will have to gulf'. Erard starts with Spooner (now that you are jawfully loined) and shows the development of a theory of slips of the tongue and other, um, errors.

This is a serious linguistic work. If you enjoy indignation at 'these degenerate days', read D-ck C-v-tt and his ilk.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tips of the slongue, May 25, 2008

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Michael Erard's terrific new book, "Um", covers everything from spoonerisms and malapropisms to eggcorns and mondegreens. If you haven't heard of the last two, they're covered here with aplomb (a plum?) as are dozens of examples of pause fillers. Since George Bush seems to have increased his summer reading over the past few years, this is one book the president shouldn't miss...he may be part of the impetus for its publication.

Ever since a friend of mine asked me at dinner years ago, "when will our waiter soove the serp?", I've been fascinated by the oddities that fly from innocent mouths. Erard categorizes these verbal miscues into all sorts of arrangements and a glossary at the end of the book is helpful in reminding the reader what material has been covered. The author looks at two areas that were of particular interest...how slips of the tongue differ in other languages and cultures and how children handle pauses and perseverations (for example) at various stages of their fluency development.

Erard has a clear and nicely-paced narrative style making "Um" such an enjoyable book. An appealing sequel would be one that comments on the three current presidential candidates and their varying contributions to public discourse, relative to what the author has written here. The next time I have my own slip of the ear (as when I heard someone say "grocery seats" when they meant "gross receipts") I'll refer back to "Um" and have a good laugh all over again.