I've been waiting to post this until I could link to it online, but that may take a while yet. In the September 21, 2007 issue of Science, I have a news feature on the newest research in slips of the tongue & hand, including the first report of comparative cognitive scientist Heidi Lyn's analysis of errors made by Kanzi and Panbanisha, the bonobos, in vocabulary tests.

It's first time in 30 years that ape language research has made it into Science, Lyn told me.

Update: I was going to summarize Lyn's study, but then I found an upload of the article here .

Went to the Penske store yesterday to reserve a truck for the move next month -- not that I needed to do this, given that so many people come to Austin, the parking lot is full of trucks. "Yes, we're leaving Austin," I said. "You're welcome. That's two fewer cars on the road." "But that doesn't matter," he said, "because there are five hundred people who are taking your place. People just keep coming, and coming, and coming, and coming."

Here's a pic of our new living room (please note, it's not our stuff):

Statesman columnist Katherine Tanney visited my talk at BookPeople and wrote this last Sunday:

"I'm Michael Erard. I will say "um" and "uh" tonight because I have trademarked them and wish to exercise my rights."

So began the witty, stimulating talk at BookPeople Sept. 18 by the Austin author (soon to be a resident of Maine), whose book, "Um ... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean," drew many linguists, speech therapists, and educators among the 35 in the audience. Erard defended President Bush's many delays and slips of the tongue as normal errors and accidents of spoken communication.

The real question, said the author, is what can be learned about people from the neurological misfires, disfluencies and self-repairs exhibited in their everyday speech.

Erard's observations:

American men use "um" as a placeholder indicating that they aren't ready to give up conversational space, even when they don't know what they're going to say next.

Some people wander, lost, into "syntactical mazes," having learned, "Don't stop talking and never admit that you don't know the answer."

"I, like, had six beers" is an entirely different statement from "I had, like, six beers."

In attendance: Dave Miller, who used to train people to pass the State Department's Foreign Service Exam in Washington. He confirmed that government agencies involved in international affairs pay a great deal of attention to conversational signals. "Don't talk when you don't have the answer," he advised. "Look at the floor and move your eyes as though you're thinking." Books sold: 24.

Is that "only 24!" or "wow, 24!"? At least five people there already had copies, including fabulous factchecker Mimi Bardgjy.

The original piece is here.

Fortunately, Rachel Proctor May is my friend; if I didn't know someone who wrote so hilariously she would have to be invented. Here she writes a mock essay for NPR's "This I Believe." (Which apparently garnered her a comment from the "This I Believe" producer, who said -- in a pretty good indication of the self-important humorlessness of that series -- he'd never had a chance to reject it.)

From the Maine Press Herald, a reporter's request for info from readers:

Have you turned your heat on yet? It's a point of pride for a lot of Mainers to keep the heat off as long into the fall as possible, then compare and contrast their furnace turn on date with friends and neighbors. Do you remember the latest you turned your heat on in any given year? Do you do certain things to make sure you don't have to turn your heat on until November? Do you feel bad if you turn your heat on before October?

This is very amusing, because Texans have no such point of pride about their AC turn-on date. In fact, in many places AC seems to be constantly on. One of my neighbors has her AC going in March. I used to try to stave off AC season as long as possible, but this year I realized that our house doesn't ventilate well otherwise: once it gets hot and humid enough, moisture condenses on the (relatively cooler) concrete slab. Solution? Turn on the AC.

If you do say to Texans that you turned your AC on later or didn't turn it on at all, perhaps because you didn't have it, they won't congratulate you for your fortitude but look at you askance for your foolishness.

So I'm explaining this to Misty, who says: so when you said you were splitting wood, you were actually splitting wood because you used it for heat? Yeah -- it's not like a rite of passage or a ceremonial photo, chopping the half-cord that makes you a man, not like Texas, where babies and kids sitting in bluebonnets are photographed, or where you get your picture taken with your first deer. I grew up splitting wood all the time, spent more time with pieces of trees than I did among whole, live trees. We cut and split and stacked wood almost all year, except for that short period in the winter when all the fallen trees were under the snow, though even then you were moving wood from the woodshed to the basement, from the basement up the stairs to the woodbox by the woodstove. It has been strange to me (I realize now) to live in places where one doorway is not littered with bark chips. Though a lot, once we get to Maine, will seem strange to me, how I have lived here, how I expected to.

(And honestly, I don't say this in a When I Was a Boy, We Ate Hardship For Breakfast sort of way--the truth is, if it wasn't inconvenient, filling the woodbox had its moments of pleasure. In our house, the staircase to the basement was tight and steep, ladder-like, so maneuvering up with an arm-load of wood was a feat of balance; an everyday feat, but still. Filling the box in three or four trips made me feel strong, and girls liked muscles.

In 1930, William Cameron Townsend, his wife, and his parents met with Edward Sapir, the University of Chicago linguist, to discuss what alphabet to use for the Cakchiquel dictionary (the first ever) they were working on. Sapir's discussions with Townsend (to try to get him to devise a scientific orthography and compile a dictionary) were central to Townsend's later efforts. Writes historian William Svelmoe:

These were circles in which Townsend would never have moved under normal circumstances, but the very task of translation, as well as his own predilection toward being a "gentleman scientist," drew Townsend into academic circles. The interest which such associations aroused in him laid a foundation for the eventual academic and linguistic focus of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

This, of course, is precious historical stuff, if you know anything about the criticisms that secular academic linguists have of SIL work nowadays, which is that it's tainted with religion. It seems that Sapir, great great godfather of the discipline (and especially of the anthropological fieldwork tradition), had little problem with working with a Bible translation project.

An international group of teenagers discussed Um... the other day here; one person reported they heard me on NPR, someone else saying they had just checked the book out. Since it's apparently an international group, they also mention filled pauses in other languages they speak or are learning, which is cool: Chinese ("a 'nnn' sound"), Spanish (Es decir, pues), Danish ("It's also one of the hard parts of talking another language. 'Øh'and 'æh' is just in my head, so when I'm talking English I have to remember to say 'um'), and French ("In French they say Ben... (pronounced bang, kind of, but without the ng.")