“Like anything new, it’s difficult for authors and agents to understand when we say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not going to be in The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune, but you are going to be at curledup.com,’ ” said Trish Todd, publisher of Touchstone Fireside.

Not me. Curledup.com, give me a call.

Mr. [Richard] Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

That a quote from Richard Ford, evidently a naive dinosaur, is the kicker to a piece in the New York Times about the migration of book reviews to blogs is rich with lots of ironic sedimentation: exactly because newspapers have the backing of the institutions they do, they do not -- can not -- have responsible relationships to readers. (Judith Miller?) This is the biggest reason for people's migration to blogs: why should the guys and gals in their basements trust the newspapers, the television stations, the publishers, all the media outlets that treat them like eyeballs attached to wallets? Respect the crowd.

For another thing, as Adam Langer wrote about in the Book Standard in 2005, there are so many external constraints on book reviewers that they barely get to utilize that judgment and filter that Richard Ford prizes so highly. To wit: Jeff Salamon at my local paper gets 200 books a week but can only review 2 to 7 of them.

Newspapers don't buy books. People in Terre Haute, and elsewhere, living in basements and penthouses, do. I want to sell books to them.

Weird. So today I get interviewed by a freelancer who's doing a piece for Real Simple about "um," "like," "whatever," and maybe "you know" and "yeah no." Then my friend Jill sends a link to a story that local tv station KXAN is airing -- done by the meteorologist (no, I don't understand it either) -- tomorrow night about the same set of words.

Go here to see the range of opinions people hold about the words. It's interesting when people write they're "guilty" of saying certain things...you poor people, I think, to feel so ashamed of what comes out of your mouth naturally. Come to me, and I will lighten your burden.

My LibriVox story was reprinted in The Ottawa Citizen.

Design Observer has my piece up about David Harrison's new book, When Languages Die:

Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality atop exoticism, journalists haven't done much better. As for me, afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the fetishizing of Last Things, I've kind of been repulsed by the topic and have never written about it.

Until now, that is.

To read the rest of the piece, go here.

My Librivox story was linked on Arts & Letters Daily.

Kirkus Reviews gives Um... a starred review!

It's a "A lascinating fook at yet another revealing instance of human imperfection."

The review also says:

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.

Steph sends a new idiom she heard today at work:

we're getting a lot of wood behind the arrow

"The context was collecting data in support of a conceptual design. Never heard this one before, and frankly it doesn't make much sense."

Beats me.

Publishers Review reviews Um... and likes it!

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.)