http://www.michaelerard.com/um/ en-us Copyright 2009 Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:12:40 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Um... is the natural history of 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 a natural history of how we listen: only about one slip of the tongue registers to our ears, and unless it's really, really bad, 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. Um... is also a cultural history. How have verbal blunders been interpreted in different periods of history? Freud was one interpreter; so was showman tv producer Kermit Schafer. The fun poked at President George W. Bush was an ongoing public interpretation, not only of what came out of the man's mouth, but of our media environment and expectations about presidential eloquence. 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.) Um... is available in hardcover and paperback. It was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the New York Observer, the Chicago Tribune (where it was an editor's pick), the Austin American Statesman, the Austin Chronicle, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines around the US, Canada, and abroad. I did over 60 radio interviews for the book, including appearances on Weekend All Things Considered, On the Media, The Tavis Smiley Show, Whad'Ya Know?, Voice of America, Australian Broadcasting Company, Canadian Broadcasting Company, and multiple commercial and public radio stations all over the US. See the website at www.umthebook.com. Read about my new book, Babel No More, here: www.babelnomore.com. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/um/2007/02/um_the_book.html http://www.michaelerard.com/um/2007/02/um_the_book.html Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:12:40 -0600