tag:www.michaelerard.com,2007:/um//6 2007-02-28T02:48:34Z Movable Type 3.31 tag:www.michaelerard.com,2007:/um//6.187 2007-02-11T17:12:40Z 2007-02-28T02:48:34Z

Coming in August 2007 from Pantheon. On the surface, Um… is about how we speak, and why casual, everyday speaking (and formal speaking, too) is filled with verbal blunders. On the average, a native speaker of English makes no...

Michael Erard http://michaelerard.com Coming in August 2007 from Pantheon. On the surface, Um… is about how we speak, and why casual, everyday speaking (and formal speaking, too) is filled with verbal blunders. On the average, a native speaker of English makes no more than two slips of the tongue every 1,000 words, and they interrupt, mispronounce, or replace with “uh” and “um” about five to eight percent of their words. It’s also about how we listen, sometimes casually, at other times acutely. Only about one slip of the tongue registers to our ears each week, and the fragmented, hesitant quality of speaking is routinely ignored. Our attention rises and falls for any number of reasons, which suggests that we usually hear the blunders we want to, not the ones that are present. To see where I started on this path, read the articles I wrote for the New York Times and the Texas Observer. At another level, Um… is about, well, a lot of things, one of which is how and why our attention to some verbal blunders rises and falls. Why was the spoonerism named after Reverend Spooner (and not some other absent-minded person)? Where did the Freudian slip come from? Why do we prize umlessness in speaking, and how long has that been the case? And what about President Bush? The point of all this is, we prefer (and notice) in speakers what we prefer (and notice) in the selves we desire. One way to trace the blunders we listen for is to look at the cultural, technological, and historical currents that shape us. I wrote Um... because I wanted to know what normal speaking is actually like, and I wanted to talk to people who worked with verbal blunders as a part of their daily lives: journalists, transcribers, interpreters, cops, linguists, psychologists. That is, people whose first reaction to verbal blunders wasn’t to laugh at them, eliminate them, or denigrate people who made them. Along the way, I learned that the earliest recorded word of Thomas Edison’s that still exists is “uh,” that children begin making slips of the tongue at 18 months, and that Kermit Schafer’s tv and radio bloopers are still pretty funny. (Click here to listen to "Blooper Man," Schafer's theme song.) You might think, the person who writes a book about verbal blunders must make a lot of them himself, but I’m fairly normal – I do know how my blunders differ from yours, though, and what that says about me. Um… isn’t a book that defends rules about how to speak, nor will it encourage you to break those rules. I’m more interested in where those norms come from and, most of all, why they matter. (Something tells me I'm going to be explaining this a lot.) Pantheon will officially publish the book in August. But you can already go to Amazon to preorder Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean ]]>