A good example of how it's not so much the slip itself as the context in which it's made.
In the video, the preacher says "pinch his tits" instead of "pitch his tents" (which also happens to be a perfect example of the /I/ - /E/ vowel merger -- the preacher's vowel in "tits" is the same one for his successful "tents").

He then exacerbates his problem by continuing to refer to the audience's laughter, but this one was probably unrecoverable.

YouTube is a rich source of this stuff. Who needs Kermit Schafer, really.

Then there's the whole phenomena of getting yourself tattooed in a language you don't speak, a script you don't read, which often goes bad. From the BBC:

When teenager Joanne Raine had her boyfriend's nickname "Roo" tattooed on her stomach it was supposed to be a sign of her undying love.

The 19-year-old from Darlington paid £80 for the Chinese artwork in 2004 and was delighted with the results.

That was until she showed it off in a Chinese takeaway and found out it actually spelled "supermarket."

The helpful blog Hanzi Smatter disputes that the characters mean "supermarket." Commenters have fun trying to figure out what it does mean, until someone writes in to say it's the name of a Chinese supermarket chain (without corroboration).

Update: changed the typo on the hanzi blog, got the joke. Thanks to the king of closed captions.

Just found out that an upper division cognitive psych class at Allegheny College is using Um... as a textbook. Watch undergrads blog about Um... here! If you're a high school teacher or college professor and want to use Um... as a textbook, get in touch with me; Random House will provide desk review copies, and I'm happy to talk to your class in person or online.

Discovered the new motto for Um... in Donna Haraway's new book, When Species Meet:

Making mistakes is inevitable and not particularly illuminating; making mistakes interesting is what makes the world new.

At a Superbowl party, I met a psychiatrist who asked me (we were talking about Um...) if I believed in the unconscious. If you mean the semiotic detritus of life that's lying around and can be borrowed, deployed, or shanghaied for acts of interpretation, sure, I replied (or something like that -- it was the Superbowl). Here's a perfect example. I sent Misty an email talking about a conversation yesterday, in which I'd been worrying about the social dynamics in various workplaces. But instead of "handwringing" I wrote "handwriting." Ah, beautiful. Dr. Freud?

I can't think of anything that would have led me to write "writing" instead of "wringing," except maybe that I was thinking about the email I had just written to someone else. But since the content of my worrying was about writing, broadly construed (both as an act and as my future doing it), this is an opportunity for some interpretation, some meaning making. That's what I think a Freudian slip is -- not a bald linguistic error, but one with an opportunity for poetry. Or at least self-examination.

Publicizing Um on Wordsmith.org's author chat - read the transcript.

Interesting comment from here about how McCain's campaign placed teleprompters so he would look more natural giving a speech:

I wish that once, just once, the cameras would show us what is really going on in these rooms. It would both legitimate and honest to show the candidate making a speech AND the teleprompters AND the cue cards/big screen TVs etc. Why does the media allow politicians to get away this fiction that they have memorized their speeches and are delivering them extemporaneously?

I'm all for breaking down the fourth wall, but does anyone actually believe this fiction anymore? And if they don't, when did they stop? "They" being American audiences, consumers of political theater? If a scholar of political communication were to take this on as a topic, I would bet they'd look at the construction of extemporaneity as a rhetorical choice -- but not at how people perceived said construction/fiction. Perhaps the fiction is not so much rhetorical as it is ritualistic: a summoning of the order of the universe through the repetition of what has been and what will always be. Which is why it would look strange if the fourth wall were broken, not because the interaction would be less persuasive but because it's a threatening departure.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is a serious, thoughtful guy -- which is probably why the blooper and outtake reel from TPMtv is one of the more popular ever. Maybe it's wouldn't be so funny if he didn't look like a slim Ricky Gervais.

Geoff Nunberg talked about "um" -- and mentioned my book, Um... -- on Fresh Air yesterday; the text of his piece is here.

He invents a term that I particular like: the "umological paradox," which is that why is a word that's communicatively so useful routinely so criticized and battered? I think I provided the answer in the book: a changing technological and media landscape in the early 20th century, as well as new ideals about the presentation of self, more widespread opportunities to speak in public, and the commercializing of broadcast media changed how we judged others' speaking and regulated our own. It's true that some mention against "urs" (as by Oliver Wendell Holmes) appears earlier, but the prescription against "um" just wasn't as widespread then as it is now. Now everybody thinks that umlessness is godliness -- or, at least, the mark of eloquence (or a piece of it).

I know this shift occurred because for the book I looked through as many 18th and 19th books as I thought would contain such finger-shaking. They didn't. That's not to say that people were more lax then. They had plenty of rules about how language should be used, but it was mainly about dialect and pronunciation, not about making uninterrupted utterances.

Somebody once asked me, "How will Um... make me play poker?" Here's one answer: if "um" can be used deliberately (as Geoff points out) as well as unintentionally, then the simple presence of "um" (or some other pause filler) isn't as telling as you might like. Here a tell isn't always a tell.

Yes, yes, yes: Um... has the answers (and more!), if you're asking questions about these topics:

born malapropisms 1844 william spooner
brain lesions what do they mean
bush bloopers speach only a mother would give
Bush's verbal and grammatical lapses 2001
calvin coolidge speaking mannerism
calvin coolidge speech impediment
calvin coolidge verbal
biography of rev. dr. william archibald spooner
biography of reverend william spooner
biography of william a spooner
biography rev w a spooner teacher
blair french language blunder
bloopers born 1844
blubters
blunders
blunders by tv commentators
average verbal fillers used a day attitudes towards filled pauses
anxiety disorder saying um
abnormal use of the word "um"
1844 born spoken bloopers
"um" and other verbal miscues
"self-repair" "slips of the tongue
reverend william spooner
speaking voice ronald reagan
spoken bloopers
the um book
william archibald spooner
"public speaking" misspeaking
why we use um speaking
why do speech slips happen?
words instead of um
weird psycholinguistics phenomena
what causes a rambling verbal style in an interview
what do slips of the tongue mean
what do you call misspeaking, switching first letters of two words
use of the word um when nervous
verbal blundering is integral to language
verbal filler
verbal fillers
verbal leakage and speech codes
verbal placeholders and do you know what i mean
verbal reversals consonant mixup
vocabulary bloopers president bush
um well uh are examples of linguistics
the psychology and power of silence in communication
sources about verbal fillers
speakers chooses the wrong word
speech blunders and the brain
speech errors linguistic transcript
speech listen um
signs of redundancy and verbal clutter
public speaking blunders
public speaking speech cognitive load
my husband says i verbally attack him out of the blue but i can't see it
how to avoid like and um when speaking
how to avoid verbal gaffes
how to stop using words such as "like" and "you know" and "um"
how to transcribe stuttering sentence
how to write ums in verbatim transcription interview
i keep mixing up my words is this early alzheimer's spoonerisms
hesitations, tip-of-the-tongue
history of the english language and using verbal fillers
feldman mannerisms etiquette
elocution lessons in massachusetts
disfluency by deborah tannen
disfluency disorders
download tracy chapman "london 1988"
dubya's linguistic blunders
eliminating the word "um" in speech exercises

(culled from the search terms by which people have arrived at umthebook.com.

I am obliged to quote from today's NYT report from the Harry Potter lexicon trial:

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

Thanks for plugging my book, Steven! The check's in the mail.

Misty, meaning to say "rural or urban," instead saying "url and -- " and stopping short of "url and burban."