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

by Michael Erard

Book Overview

Essential reading for talkers and listeners of all stripes: An original, entertaining, and surprising book that investigates verbal blunders: what they are, what they say about those who make them,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375423567
• ISBN13: 9780375423567
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.7" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Interesting book.

Interesting to read, would recommend it just for kicks / if theres time to read.

Tips of the slongue

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.

Both leisure readers and students of language alike will find it engrossing.

Either high school or college-level literary libraries or those strong in psychology and language will find UM an excellent survey which considers the verbal blunder and its underlying psychology. With its strong introduction in the history of language and disfluency from ancient Greece to modern times to its survey of how slips of the tongue gained new meaning from psychology, both popular culture and literature figure in a survey which is a funny yet pointed study of everyday speech and language development. Both leisure readers and students of language alike will find it engrossing.

Excellent, Modern Scholarship

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.

Better Thinking Through Errors

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, a