Literature

So, uh, this book

It, you know, explains all those, er, pauses in everyday speech

John Freeman

An “um” or “er” is not simply a pause, according to linguist Michael Erard. In his fascinating (and forgiving) debut book, Um ..., Erard describes all the ways we edit, stumble, trip over or transpose words while talking, then tells us what it all means. If only all our second-grade English teachers had been so gentle on our broken tongues.

Slipping, the book suggests, is natural, even preferable to the smooth, polished delivery of the unnervingly fluent. In one psychologist’s 1955 study, a “speech disturbance” occurred within the general population every 4.4 seconds. Erard says the book developed partly out of a frustrated desire to improve upon his own slow, sometimes halting verbal delivery, which he later discovered from friends makes him seem thoughtful and considerate.

Stigmatized and turned humorous by innumerable Woody Allen films, uh and um actually don’t occur more often in nervous people, or the depressed, or even your mopey teenager. Erard cites one study that shows that it occurs less in the young than the elderly, who are presumably far less self-conscious than any other group.

As it turns out, um and er are more a function of one’s “cognitive load.” This can mean several things. Contrary to our image of them, humanists blunder more than scientists or social scientists. “Their field gave them more thoughts and ideas to express,” Erard writes, in a debatable conclusion, “and they hesitated and paused more often because that had more options for self-expression.”

So the nutty professor really isn’t the chemist, but rather your creative-writing guru. Erard has obviously collected some of the great stumblers of all time, including William Archibald Spooner—nicknamed the Spoo—of Oxford University, the man who once reputedly toasted Queen Victoria with “Give three cheers for our queer old dean.”

Surprisingly, one of the fellows who come out of this book with only a light chuff on the shoulder is President George W. Bush. Calling Bush our “linguistic punching bag,” Erard argues that 43’s gaffes before microphones say more about us than about him.

“Americans tend to hold ideas about how their presidents speak” developed mostly from movies, Erard writes, and goes on to remind us that for half of America’s history we haven’t been able to even hear our presidents. Thomas Jefferson, he writes, was a verbal blunderer of the first degree.

“One who in imagination hears the pitch and cadence and rhythm of the thing he wishes to say before he says it,” wrote historian Carl Becker, “often makes a sad business of public speaking because, painfully aware of the imperfect felicity of what has been uttered, he forgets what he ought to say next.”

Now say that sentence five times fast.

Um ...: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blinders, and What They Mean

***

Michael Erard

Pantheon, $24.95

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