There's a word in Brazil, xara, that refers to that loose affinity group of people who share your name. Now, if I had a name like "John Smith" or "Mary Jones," this could be another blog entry about the joys and woes of my many xara, and perhaps a celebration of the xara club we founded through Facebook, and how we all met up in Miami for a weekend, and how we sometimes get each other's bills, and how Google searches of our names are less informing because we have to pick through entries about the others.

But with a name like "Michael Erard," you're going to know all the people who share your name. And I know exactly two: my grandfather, who went by Michael R. Erard, and my father, who goes by Michael C. Erard. However, if you came here via Google, you might have seen that there's a photographer who shares my name. And who apparently has no middle initial. Or like me, doesn't use his. I don't even know who he is, or if we're related.

All this to say: I'm not that photographer.

My wife (a born & bred 10th generation Texan) and I are walking through the streets of Portland, Maine, where we come upon a grand Civil War statue in a plaza, a massive winged victory atop a stone base honoring Union dead.

Misty, puzzled, turns to me: Wait, does that mean...

Me: Yeah. We won.

*Alternative Title: On the sort of good-humored political joking about civil war that George Bush et al. apparently hope will occur in Iraq tomorrow so that the US military can leave, which in fact takes about 150 years to happen and which, even today, remains an off-color joke in certain circles and requires years of professional training to tell safely. So do not try this at home.

From an interview with Dennis Loy Johnson, publisher of Melville House Books:

After 9/11, the best-selling books in America were all from independent and university presses, and they were books about Islam and spirituality and books about the twin towers and so on—people were searching for the kind of information the newspapers and television weren’t really covering. And they were buying these books in large numbers, and totally ignoring the entertainment tripe on offer from the big publishers. This is a story—a little remarked upon story—that says something really glorious about the American book buyer. And it’s in stark contrast to the accepted wisdom, which is that there is a diminishing audience for serious books....

...Despite the failure of the rest of America’s mainstream media, and despite this fact that this has become a virulently anti-intellectual culture—because of those things, in part—even here in Dumbfuckistan books have awesome super powers.

I shut off comments a couple of weeks ago, in the middle of a Category 3 spamstorm...let's see if the eye of the storm has passed. Let me know if you try to post and can't.

The other day, I was talking to a prominent cognitive scientist who's done a lot of work on speech errors. He told me that in high school, he worked as a lifeguard at a pool where Joe Biden, future Senator and presidential candidate, was a supervisor. So back in 2005, when Biden said, "I'm going to the president's funeral" (replacing "pope" with "president"), and was subsequently mocked for letting his deathwish for W. hang out, the scientist thought if he dropped Biden a note, it might actually get to the man.

Buck up, the note said, this is a pretty common sort of malapropism, you made it because "president" and "pope" are both names of heads of state and you probably say "president" a lot more frequently, it doesn't mean you have a death wish, it's perfectly explainable from a psycholinguistic viewpoint.

Said scientist doesn't live in Delaware, and the note was returned unread. What Biden's presidential aspirations might have been...

Since Um… came out on August 21st, I've had a lot of opportunities to say "um" on the radio, to interviewers, and even on television. I am sure that I said "um" to Dante Dominick of The Onion's A/V Club, Harris Salat of Visual Thesaurus, Robert Lowman of the LA Daily News, and Scott Blackwood at the Austin Chronicle, but they're too kind to say anything (and they also read the book, so they know better). Sara Reistad-Long of Real Simple, Whitney Fuller of O Magazine, and Hannah Morrill of Allure also heard a few of my "uhs" and "ums."

I said "um" to Debbie Elliott of NPR's "Weekend All Things Considered," to Tavis Smiley of the "Tavis Smiley Show," and to Bob Garfield of "On the Media."

Michael Feldman of "Whad'Ya Know" got a few, too.

Live radio provides abundant opportunities for people to say "um," and I took them all: on KUOW, the NPR affiliate in Seattle; KLTK-FM in Minneapolis; "On Point," from WBUR in Boston; and the "Marc Steiner Show" on WYPR in Baltimore. All were great fun.

I said "um" to Mike Carruthers of “Something You Should Know.”

I also said "um" on the “Jim Scott Morning Show” in Cincinnatti, 700-WLW AM; on "The Armstrong and Getty Show," 910 KNEW in San Francisco; on KOLE news radio in north Texas; on "Journey Home," Diego Mulligan's show on KSFR in Santa Fe; on "Morning Drive" on AM800 CKLW in Detroit; on "America in the Morning," Westwood One Radio Networks; on "The Bax and O'Brien Show" on WAQY-FM in Springfield/Hartford; on the “Morning Show with Ken and Kitty” on WODE 99.9 FM in Allentown/Easton, Pennsylvania; to Fred Reiss on his show on KFOX in California; and on the “The Literally Literal” show on WSUM in Wisconsin.

An aside: Fred Reiss called the book "The Tipping Point meets Elements of Style."

I said "um" on "The Bill Handel Show, KFI-AM 640 in Burbank, and to Michelangelo Signorile on his show on Sirius Radio.

I even said "um" to ABC's Chris Connelly on i-Caught.

And that's not all: I said "um" on “The 55KRC Morning Show with Brian Thomas and John Phillips” in Cincinatti; on Voice of America's "Wordmaster," with Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble; on "Aeilli Unleashed," with John Aeilli at KUT in Austin; on the "Colin McEnroe" show on WTIC News/Talk 1080 in Hartford; and on the "Busted Halo" show on Sirius Radio.

So if you or your show isn't on this list, and you want me to come on and say "uh" and "um" -- and, more importantly, talk about the only book ever written about the accidents and spontaneities of speaking for a popular audience, let me know.

In the Q&A I did for the Austin Chronicle, there is one entirely fictional item.

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."

That I created a backstory to William Spooner's blundering is fitting, given how most of the spoonerisms attributed to the man were invented by others. (It's also possible to deliberately reverse sounds and words -- just last night I heard about a fire dispatcher named Dick Dickerson who could tell whole stories full of spoonerisms -- and humorists like Colonel Stoopnagel have long plied their stuff.) But the backstory of Spooner -- that he was an absent-minded guy, maybe with some brain disorder, but not as prodigious a spoonerizer as we think -- is so boring, don't you think? We can make up much better ones. Go over the top.

Um... has been reviewed in the Denver Post, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Santa Cruz Sentinel, New York Times Book Review, New York Times, New York Observer, Savannah Morning News, Austin American Statesman, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times, Louisville Courier-Journal, San Diego Union-Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Texas Observer, Book Page, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The Week, The New Yorker, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tampa Tribune, the Charlotte Observer, the Oxford Press, Deseret Morning News, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Taunton Gazette.

It didn't take long for spammers to find this little site, so I'm turning off comments, again.

In Um..., I mention Mohamed Sami Anwar, a linguist who, in 1978, described a long tradition in Arabic linguistics of noting and collecting errors, a tradition that predated Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Meringer by many centuries. It was never clear to me that the Arabs were collecting slips of the tongue, and now I know that they definitely weren't.

For nearly all of its history, the Koran has been read by Muslims only in Arabic. As Islam spread, people who didn't speak Arabic natively had to learn it, which changed the language, much to the chagrin of speakers of Classical Arabic. So the "pure" Arabs became shocked at the corruption of the language, and collected examples of these corruptions:

Ziyad ibn 'Abihi sent for 'Abu l'-Aswad and said to him: 'O 'Abu l-'Aswad, these foreigners have multiplied and corrupted the tongues of the Arabs. Couldn't you compose something to correct their language and give God's Book its proper decelension?'

'Abu l'-Aswad refuses -- he has other things to do. So Ziyad ibn 'Abihi sends someone to casually pass by 'Abu l'-Aswad and say something from the Koran, but to make some mistake.

'Abu l'-Aswad was shocked. He returned immediately to Ziyad and said to him: 'I'd like to comply with what you asked me to do and I think it would be best to start with the declension of the Qu'ran.

This is much elaborated in Kees Versteegh's excellent books about Arabic and Arabic linguistics. As Versteegh explains, other explanations for the birth of Arabic linguistics are also founded in observations of mistakes that are perceived to corrupt the language.