Michael Erard - Archives

Jan Freeman, the regular language columnist for the Boston Globe, handed me her space when she went on vacation. This was my piece...

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.

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I have one word for you glib, fluent people, you who sound smooth, scripted, and rehearsed, who execute each sentence with crisp precision, because your success may be at stake:

“Um.”

Here and there you can catch a new attitude about this and other hesitations to the ideal, uninterrupted flow of speaking. Barack Obama’s main political consultant, David Axelrod, likes to record video of people on the street for political ads; they inevitably say “uh” or “um,” which he likes, he says, because it’s more authentic.

Read the rest of this piece here.