Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

by Erard, Michael.

  The Old Testament also noted speechlessness and speech impediments—Moses responds to the burning bush, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharoah? I am a man of feeble speech and a slow tongue.” Homer included them in the Iliad and the Odyssey (Penelope loses her speech when she hears the suitors’ plot to kill her son, Telemachus), and they appeared in tragedies like Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. In his natural history texts, Aristotle discussed why humans speak (and why animals don’t). He even referred to imperfections in children’s speech, but he didn’t single out “uh” and “um.” A later text, Problems, generally attributed to Aristotle but whose true authorship is a mystery, discusses ischnophonos (hesitancy in speech), traylos (lisping), and psellos (stammering). Ischnophonos comes closest to what we might call “hemming and hawing.” But it might also refer to an inability to select words, as might befall someone with aphasia, a language disorder caused by stroke or trauma. In either case, the writer, whoever he was, doesn’t illustrate with details.

  The Oxford English Dictionary first notes “hem,” an alternate spelling of “um,” in 1526, citing John Skelton, an English rhetorician and translator, who wrote, “Hem, syr yet beware of Had I wyste!” “Um” also appears as “hum,” “uh” as “haw,” defined as “an utterance marking hesitation.” According to the OED, the first written use of “haw” comes in 1679, where a woman is described as having “a little haugh in her speech.” “Hum” is even older, dating to 1469. The dictionary calls it “an articulate vocal murmur uttered with closed lips in a pause of speaking from hesitation, embarrassment, or affectation.” Shakespeare uses it in The Winter’s Tale, in Leontes’s misogynistic tirade against Hermione, saying that she can’t be called both good and honest. “These shrugs, these hums and ha’s, when you have said she’s goodly, come between ere you can say she’s honest.”

  On the job, people who may have noticed “uh” and “um” didn’t write them down either. Consider the notes taken during court proceedings by scribes using quill pens that periodically needed to be dipped in ink. At top speed, scribes wrote about 30 words a minute. They were still outpaced by brisk talkers putting out 250 words a minute. So there may have been a technical reason that the gaps, falterings, and backtrackings of spontaneous speaking by judges, clients, lawyers, plaintiffs, or defendants weren’t recorded. Even when defendants were questioned after they’d been flogged, the scribes filtered out the blunders, according to Daniel Collins, a linguist at the Ohio State University who has studied trial transcripts from medieval Russia. Collins knows of a few cases where there is evidence that someone stopped talking or became muddled, but the reason for including such random details isn’t noted, and is now—like nearly every other verbal blunder ever spoken—lost to time.

  If the aesthetic of umlessness doesn’t appear to have its roots in classical ideas about speaking well, perhaps its origin is more contemporary: in the tensions and battles about English in America. In the 1800s, as the United States left behind its status as a colony, Americans of all social classes struggled to sort out an emerging American dialect from the British one. As in other countries growing into their nationhood, language became a matter of national character. Commentators and educators sought to define and impose a uniform dialect on the range of American vernaculars, institute standards for spelling and pronunciation, write authoritative dictionaries and books of English usage, and establish teaching methods.

  By the 1850s, language became a matter of social character. In burgeoning cities, people of different classes and backgrounds mingled, some of whom had taken advantage of American society’s openness to aspiring to higher social status. In this context, nonstandard language was less marked by regional dialect than by the vulgarities, slang, and colloquialisms that the lower classes used. New standards of civility and manners were not only forced on language: twenty-eight different manuals outlining etiquette appeared in the 1830s, thirty-six in the 1840s, and thirty-eight in the 1850s. They encouraged their readers to adopt the manners of metropolitan society, not only to secure success in one’s social climbing but because etiquette was seen as crucial for civil society and democracy itself.

  By the early twentieth century, it was recognized that any person had a number of social roles to play, particularly those who lived in booming commercial metropolises. For someone to speak in many different contexts—chatting colloquially in the morning, giving a lecture in the afternoon, telling genteel humorous tales after dinner, and talking to clerks, children, city officials, men, women, and workmen in between—was an expected part of daily life. How could people keep track of all these performances of different sorts of selves?

  Language as marker of identity and social status is not unique to America. But America’s vigor and pragmatism, the ferment of its diverse society, and its openness to opportunity created an environment in which people considered language mutable. In America it remains largely true that if you change what you say and how you say it, you change who you are. Before plastic surgery allowed you to change yourself physically, books, clubs, teachers, and therapists taught you to alter your accent and hide your true origins, build your vocabulary, read more literature, or discipline your grammar.

  So could “uh” and “um” have been useful shibboleths for Americans who reserved the right to make judgments about a person’s place in society based on their language?*33 Did increasingly rigid rules that looked down on ribald humor, swearing, poor spelling, and accents also extend to “uh” and “um”?

  If this had been true, you’d expect to find umlessness championed in the vast American literature aimed at improving speech. But if the numerous handbooks and textbooks on rhetoric, oratory, speech, elocution, and reading performances published in America and Great Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries were full of dictates about how to speak and write properly, they said nothing about “uh” or “um.” Books like The Philosophy of the Human Voice by James Rush (1827), A Plea for the Queen’s English by Henry Alford (1864), and The Science and Art of Elocution, or How to Read and Speak by Frank Fenno (1878) offer small armies of rules, admonitions, and exercises that stand ready to march on grammatical deviance and phonetic ugliness. Page after page contain pronunciation charts, vowel graphs, consonant tables, even musical staffs, along with grotesque diagrams of a cross-sectioned larynx, mouth, and tongue, as if learning the relevant anatomy would unlock the secret of perfect enunciation. Indeed, some elocution books taught myriad methods of disciplining the body, now mostly forgotten: illustrations showing the beauty of holding the left hand to the forehead, clasping both hands to the chest, turning the wrist and ankle just so. Other volumes are filled with model speeches to practice reading aloud, as well as lists of good words—to be recited for pronunciation practice and memorized to make one’s vocabulary sparkle—in contrast to hearty lists of bad ones—slang, vulgarisms, and regionalisms, all to be avoided.

  To pore through linguistic jeremiads by the so-called verbal critics of the nineteenth century who struggled to hold the tide against the language rot they perceived is to be struck by the lack of strictures against “uh” and “um.” They are also not mentioned in books of etiquette written for young American men and women, with sections on how to be polite to your elders, courteous, serene, and self-disciplined. Elocution books offered detailed grammatical recipes for creating specific rhetorical effects with pauses, for instance, to “pause after the nominative when it consists of more than one word.” However mind-crushing the rules were, none of the books prohibited “uh,” “ah,” “um,” “hum,” “haugh,” or “haw.”

  Even when cultural critics raged against American decadence at the dawn of the twentieth century, pause fillers didn’t seem to qualify as symptoms of the end of civilization. In 1869, the American neurologist George Beard began to popularize a malady of nervous exhaustion, labeling it “neurasthenia.” If you couldn’t sleep, were thirsty, irritable, or had noises in your ears, you were neurasthenic, overstimul
ated by modern life down to your very molecules. You were nervous, literally, in your bones. The disorder was caused by the increasing speed of modern life, the explosion of new ideas, trains, and other new machines. What was called “progress” provoked civilization’s inevitable decline—or so people like Beard worried. One symptom of American decline was decrepit language, phonetic decay, and degenerate speaking: nervous people spoke more quickly, clipped their words, and dropped their “g’s.” Beard apparently overlooked “uh” and “um.”

  Because oratory was so popular in nineteenth-century America, the elocutionary educations of famous American orators were also widely read. These stories took the form of moral tales of bad speech habits overcome by the power of will and the exercise of discipline. Yet for all their egalitarian fervor, none of them mentions the pause fillers. Henry Ward Beecher’s childhood problem was his garbled speaking. “When Henry is sent to me with a message,” his aunt once said, “I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea than if he spoke Choctaw; the second, I catch now and then a word; and by the third time, I begin to understand.” At Sunday school he was left in the catechismal dust by other children’s brilliant recitations. His sister described him as “blushing, stammering, confused and hopelessly miserable stuck on some sand-bank,…his mouth choking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled.” To cure himself Beecher tramped around in the woods and shouted vowels into the trees, transforming himself into one of the most popular orators of his day.*34

  The earliest admonition against “uh” that I was able to find comes from a long poem, Urania: A Rhymed Lesson, written in 1846 by Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). Holmes was thirty-seven years old and a professor of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College when he wrote the 749-line poem that contains a number of lines concerning proper speech, including these:

  Once more: speak clearly, if you speak at all;

  Carve every word before you let it fall;

  Don’t, like a lecturer or dramatic star,

  Try over-hard to roll the British R;

  Do put your accents in the proper spot;

  Don’t,—Let me beg you,—don’t say “How” for “What?”

  And when you stick on conversation’s burrs,

  Don’t strew the pathway with those dreadful urs.

  Holmes’s spelling of “uh” as “ur” is a variant of the British spelling, “er.” That he rhymes “urs” and “burrs” suggests not so much a lax rhyme as a pronunciation of “burr” that sounded like “buh.”

  In Britain, meanwhile, they were often spelling “uh” as “haw,” and using it as the linguistic marker for a cretinous gentleman (not, as we do, for an industrial-age dropout), so that snooty inbred aristocrats were said to speak an affected “haw-haw dialect.” In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1841 novel, Night and Morning, a stranger visits Robert Beaufort to deliver the unseemly news that Beaufort’s deceased brother had been secretly married, thereby entitling the brother’s widow and two sons to the estate that Robert thought was his. “‘It is false!’ cried Mr. Beaufort, finding a voice at length, and springing to his feet. ‘And who are you, sir? and what do you mean by—’ ‘Hush!’ said the stranger, perfectly unconcerned, and regaining the dignity of his haw-haw enunciation; ‘better not let the servants hear aunything.’”

  Other people affecting the “haw” of the upper class were said to suffer from “haw-hawism.” In 1853, Robert Smith Surtees published his comic novel about fox-hunting escapades, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, in which Lord Scamperdale, a foolish whiskered bachelor, hems and haws. “‘Ha—he—hum,’” says Lord Scamperdale. “‘Meet at the Court,’ mumbled his lordship—‘meet at the court—ha—he—ha—hum—no; got no foxes.’” In 1939, the Nazi apologist William Joyce was nicknamed “Lord Haw-Haw” for speaking what was described as the “English of the haw-haw, damit-get-out-of-my-way variety” (a description given to another British citizen broadcasting for the Nazis), which no doubt added a note of class consciousness to the detestation heaped upon the man, who was executed for treason in 1946.

  One might assume from the written record that pause fillers were used only by the British, not by Americans. But Mark Twain’s writing is full of evidence that nineteenth-century Americans used pause fillers. Well-known for having an ear sensitive to the rhythms of talk and the peculiarities of American dialects, Twain used many pause fillers in his dialogue. George Mahl did a little study of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, in which Tom, Huck, Becky, Aunt Polly, the schoolteacher, Joe Harper, Muff Potter, Mrs. Harper, and an anonymous playmate all repeat themselves and restart their sentences in situations of emotional distress. Only Tom says “uh,” usually when he’s trying to remember his Bible verses.

  We have evidence of American umming with the oldest extant recording of Thomas Edison’s voice, which dates to 1888, the year that Edison was presenting a phonograph known as his “perfected phonograph.” Unlike his first version from ten years earlier, this one reproduced a person’s voice more faithfully, using cylinders that were replaceable and transportable. Though no specific accounts exist, we suspect that the recording came from one of the public exhibitions of the phonograph, such as the one at New York’s Electric Club on West 22nd Street, on May 12, 1888. Members of the industrial elite, military leaders (such as General Gabriel Sherman), and politicians attended. In another room, Edison, forty-one years old at the time, recorded and played back his voice. In that particular exhibition at the New York club, it’s not known what Edison recorded, but he may have described a trip around the world, something he often did to illustrate how the phonograph could capture even foreign words. When you click on the button that plays the digital file of the recording, rattles and hisses seem to come from a million miles away—as different from a modern recording as a pinhole camera is from a digital one. Here’s the beginning of the transcript.*35 (For easier reading, I’ve put the pause fillers in bold.)

  Uh, now, Mr. Blaine, as you’ve been nearly around the world, I’ll take you around the world on the phonograph. I’ll not charge you anything. I’ll take you on a steamer, eh, a Cunard steamer to Liverpool, and from Liverpool to London, from London on the London & Brighton Railroad to Brighton, and from Brighton we’ll go on those little two-cent steamers across the English Channel to Calais. And from Calais we’ll go on the chemin du fer du nord. I can’t give you the exact Parisian pronunciation of this railroad, but I guess you’ll understand it. We’ll get into Paris and make for the, uh, Grand Hotel. And then in the morning we’ll go to our bankers and get you some money on our letters of credit.

  They continue through Europe, then into the Red Sea via the Suez Canal, “and then to, uh, Bombay” where “we’ll probably get the, uh, cholera,” then to Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, then to San Francisco, then by train back to New York. Edison signs off, “Uh, goodbye, Edison.”*36

  Given what we know about Edison’s technical perfectionism—he often threw out disks and cylinders marred by slight flaws, and he believed that recording for the phonograph required a special voice, which he didn’t possess—his willingness to overlook an inaugural “uh” suggests that the project of purging public speech of “uh” and “um” hadn’t yet gotten under way. Our aesthetic of umlessness wouldn’t crystallize for another thirty years, not until Edison’s invention brought speaking back to listeners and provided the first incontrovertible evidence of their own imperfections.

  Early in his attempts to design a phonograph, Edison projected glowing promises about the future of spoken communication. He foresaw the phonograph transforming business when businessmen could talk to each other “in perfect privacy” by sending wax cylinders back and forth, their secretaries producing transcripts on the newly invented typewriter that would contain “every break and pause, every hesitation or confident affirmation” captured by the wax. Though he obviously overestimated the willingness of readers to read verbati
m transcripts, Edison promised that the new technology would give people new ways to listen to speaking in terms of speaking, not the conventions of writing. “We shall now know for the first time what a conversation really is,” he wrote. “The phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves.”

  Gramophones, phonographs, wax cylinders, resin discs, telephones, microphones, then wire recordings and radio broadcasts, then talking pictures: these new technologies let people hear speech as it really was for the first time—an activity that happened in time, dynamic and not frozen in writing. As early as the 1890s, a nickel would buy an opportunity to hear prerecorded speeches on gramophones in entertainment arcades, and by 1908, Edison had sold more than one million gramophones. These were used in homes to listen to prerecorded wax cylinders but also to make the first home recordings, which a person did by talking into the gramophone’s horn. These recordings (and eventually broadcasts) detached speech from the speaker’s body, and they divorced speaking from actual face-to-face situations where speakers interacted with listeners. The technology also captured the stopping, repeating, and retreating of talking so that people could replay and scrutinize speech. Disembodied and nailed down, speaking became a new sort of object.

  The prohibition against “um” probably grew into a general expectation of flawless speaking with the advent of the radio. The popularity of the technology exploded in the 1920s in a way that contemporary Americans who witnessed the rise of the Internet would recognize. “All of a sudden it hit us,” a newspaper reporter wrote. For instance, in August 1921, there were two new broadcasting stations; nearly a year later, in May 1922, there were ninety-nine. Ordinary consumers waited hours to purchase radio receivers, “only to be told when they finally reached the counter that they might place an order and it would be filled when possible,” according to an editorial in the first issue of Radio Broadcast that month. Between 1922 and 1924, the Radio Corporation of America made more than eighty-three million dollars selling more than a million “radio music boxes.” Starting in the eastern United States, the radio craze eventually swept west, where isolated listeners and huge distances made radio even more popular. Radio stations received fan mail from shut-ins, remote ranchers, farmers, and gold diggers. “I am keeping bees in an abandoned lumber camp sole alone,” one man from Washington wrote. “Radio is my only comfort—it keeps me from going mad.”