The highly regarded Jan Freeman, who writes a language column highly regarded by the wordies, was kind enough to turn her space over to me this week while she's on vacation. Naturally, I wrote about slips and disfluencies:

Wildness. We go outdoors, to the mountains or the ocean, to encounter the untamed and untameable. But this quality can be found closer to home, too -- our spoken sentences are full of wildness, right under the threshold of our attention.

I'm talking, of course, about verbal blunders.

The rest of the piece is here. Thanks to Gareth Cook, Steve Heuser, and Elizabeth Gehrman.

isn't the stockmarket, it's the Baby Einstein bubble deflating:

Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.

Reading John Berryman's The Dream Songs, I discovered his paean (a slightly tongue-in-cheek one) to Eisenhower's way of speaking. It's #23, "The lay of Ike." The first stanza goes:

This is the lay of Ike.
Here's to the glory of the Great White--awk--
who has been running--er--er--things in recent--ech--
in the United--If your screen is black,
ladies & gentlemen, we--I like--
at the Point he was already terrific--sick

I'm just getting into Berryman so am not that familiar with his rhyme scheme, though in the preceding poem he rhymes ABCBCA on the first stanza and ABCCBA on the next two; I think the point is that Ike's so disjointed, even a poem about him can't keep a rhyme. (Though the last stanza has an AABCBC pattern.)

It's interesting that Berryman does this to Ike's disjoint syntax, since his narrator, Henry, also depends on breaking all sorts of grammatical conventions; and another voice, Mr. Bones, speaks in an African-American dialect, as in #36:

The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there?
--Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side.
I smell your grief.
--I sent my grief away. I cannot care
forever. With them all again & again I died
and cried, and I have to live.

--Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.

That is our 'pointed task. Love & die.

--Yes; that makes sense.

But what makes sense between, then? What if I

roiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and

just sat on the fence?

I did an interview on my Southern Baptist piece for the Texas Observer podcast, which is here.

I am pleased as pleased can be.

The folks at ChinesePod (which I praised highly in 2006 here) have released another Web 2.0 learning site for Spanish: SpanishSense.

The Economist gets what's important about this:

In the past, when language instruction—along with haircuts and massages—was a “non-tradable” sector of the economy, many people would not have found a native Mandarin speaker as a teacher in their town at all. Now they need only a broadband connection.

The Guardian has an interview with an 1980s rock star, Edwyn Collins, who suffered a stroke two years ago and had to relearn how to walk, eat, play music, and talk:

Weeks after our chance encounter in Inverness, I'm sitting with Collins in his spacious living room, the few stuffed birds in glass cases, a couple of stray guitars and a Bob Dylan Bootleg Series boxset suggesting a bohemian eccentricity. This is his first official interview since his haemorrhage. In that time, he's undergone intensive speech therapy to combat dysphasia - a neurological side-effect hindering his ability to communicate. The Collins of old was a fantastic orator, one of those rare interviewees who spoke in eloquent sentences and whose mastery of language was a dream to transcribe. Cruelly, his dysphasia means he now speaks in fractured bursts, pausing between individual words, sometimes fighting to remember a phrase that's eluding him.

The interview is a sympathetic portrait of the musician and a rare portrayal of the inside of dysphasia.

So today's New York Times Book Review was thick with personal connections: not only is Christine Kenneally, who reviewed Um..., a friend of a Lingua Franca editor, but Margalit Fox, whose book on sign language was also reviewed today, appeared in a panel discussion on linguists & journalists I organized for the Linguistic Society of America in Boston in 2004.

What's more personally meaningful, though, is that Robert and Lee Dalzell's book, The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America was also reviewed today in the Book Review. No, no, I'm not a Rockefeller. But Robert Dalzell, Jr. was my first American Studies professor at Williams. He was a tremendous teacher, frightfully Socratic, a critical grader -- for his eye I wrote my first academic arguments, and he gave me my first college A.

How unexpectedly connected this all turned out.

In 1939, a speech pathologist at the University of Iowa, Wendell Johnson, set out to test his theory about how stuttering began, by deliberately turning a group of 6 orphans into stutterers. In 2000, a newspaper reporter found some surviving orphans, many of whom said that Johnson's experiments had harmed their willingness to talk and who later sued the University of Iowa. Johnson, who died in 1965, buried the results of the study shortly after WWII -- an experiment on unsuspecting orphans was too similar to horrific Nazi science experiments then being reported -- though it lived in academic lore nicknamed "the Monster Study."

This particularly ignominious chapter in the history of speech pathology closed recently, when the University and the 6 orphans recently settled for $925,000, as reported in this piece in the Des Moines Register. The orphans had originally sued for $13.1 million. Settling was apparently a way to provide some closure to the plaintiffs, who are all in their 70s or 80s.

Today is Um...'s official release date -- I went to the bookstore and there it was on shelves. It's very exciting. At the beginning, it felt like this day would come too soon, and then it felt like it would never come, and now it's here, and the timing feels spot on.

I have a chapter in Um... about Toastmasters, so was interested to see this piece from Louisiana about a former Angola prison inmate, Ashanti Witherspoon, who joined Toastmasters in prison and continues to promote the group all over the state.

A great line from the Minnesota Star-Tribune review of Um...:

Of course, sex trumps philology every time.

How true, how true.

As the Russian poet Xlebnikov once said, "The typographical error is often a first-rate artist."

Barely a week after its release, Um... is going into a second printing, I found out today!

I haven't had time yet to blog about last weekend's festivities, including a surprise book party and my first improv comedy appearance, but I do have two pieces of news: one, we learned this morning that Um... is going in for a third printing (which must mean that the second printing was conservative). Second, open your Sept. 3 issue of the New Yorker to page 133.

I've been using a number of average words per day from a paper in Science that appeared a few weeks ago; well, here's the paper. It's (provocatively) titled, "Are women more talkative than men?" The answer is no: both men and women in a sample of 396 college students said the same number of words, an average of around 16,000.

Phone lines are open if you want to complain that 396 college students are not representative of the population as a whole.