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

by Erard, Michael.

  Clark pulled out his laptop and set it on a low table so he could flip through sound files in his collection. He clicked on a file of a twenty-second-long string that he’d excised from a radio interview with a man who was saying, “They-yah…And-uh…But-uh…But-uh…Some-uh…And-uh…As-uh…Don’t-uh…Right-uh…Some-uh…It’s-uh…It’s-uh…The-uh…We-um…Airplanes-um.”*37 It sounded like someone getting punched in the stomach each time he begins to talk. Clark had excised all the “uhs,” which were all attached to other words, saying, “His strategy is to attach the ‘uh’ to the previous word, always. He doesn’t just get but. Uh. He gets buttah.” On the whole he’s found huge variation among speakers, some who speak as few as 1.2 fillers for every thousand words, others who speak as many as 88 per thousand words.

  Clark’s research has sparked controversy about whether “uh” and “um” are symptoms of delay or (as he argues) signals of delay. Liz Shriberg thinks they’re symptoms. For her, the patterns of “uh” and “um” may result more from the relationship between language and the brain than what an individual intends to say. “I think it’s hard to get inside the heads of listeners,” she told me. For instance, Shriberg has found evidence that “um” is used outside of larger clauses, while “uh” is used more frequently inside of clauses. This is because “um” is associated with the same strong change in intonation that marks the edge of a clause.

  To someone who stumbles onto Clark and Fox Tree’s work after a lifetime of valuing umlessness, the psychologists can seem to be advocating wayward speech. In 2002, when one of Clark’s articles in the journal Cognition was picked up in the mainstream media, he received a pile of angry mail. “I recently uh read an uh article by Amanda—ah—Onion about you and Jean ah Fox uh Tree,” one man wrote in an e-mail. “Then the other day I saw this ah cartoon of ‘Beetle Bailey’ and it uh dawned on me that uh that is what uh you are uh trying to do. Have all of us ah become idiots uh like the uh poor uh guy in the cartoon, you know.” He accused Clark and Fox Tree of failing as professors to teach proper communication. Instead, he said, they were teaching “mere conversation” and letting people off the hook for their bad habits.

  The writer couldn’t know that Clark’s notions about using language in public are fairly conventional, and he holds high standards for his students’ writing. When he talks to curious reporters, he makes it a point to recommend that public speakers honor their audience by removing “uh” and “um” from their speeches, just as one wouldn’t wear flip-flops to a formal occasion. At home you can wear flip-flops and say “um” all you like. As for Fox Tree, she wasn’t very pleased when her daughter came home from nursery school saying “like,” and when her students go for job interviews, she tells them not to say “uh” or “um,” either. Those words signal delay, and in such situations you want to appear on the ball, quick-witted. But with your friends? In an informal situation? Um away.*38

  This pragmatic attitude is a healthy one: uphold the standards of umlessness that are so deeply ingrained in our culture, but exempt spontaneous conversation, ordinary talking, and all but the most formal situations from them. It may even hold out promise for a new standard for public speaking. Speakers might be able to train to exploit their collateral track—to draw listeners to them, right there, in a specific moment, and really say what’s on their mind.

  Otherwise, how can speakers be made more fluent—more umless? If people have to pay money for each “uh” or “um,” repeated word, or interrupted sentence, their fluency will increase. Verbal reprimands help. So do electric shocks. Gesturing with the hands apparently keeps one fluent, and tying down someone’s right arm makes them disfluent, and even more so when their other arm’s strapped down. As Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, puts it, “When people talk, no matter what the content or purpose of their speech, they tend to do two things. They wave their arms about and they say ‘uh.’” One might skip the electricity and shouting and simply order a person to stop interrupting themselves, which works—but only for a short time, because the reprimand won’t stick.

  A person’s fluency can also be increased by reducing the amount of stress he or she feels. Paradoxically, some people can be more fluent if they feel more stressed—if someone considers a task to be more important, he or she may talk with more care. The use of “um” and “uh” is a tactic of speakers who are speaking self-consciously, argue Christenfeld and a colleague, Beth Creager. They observed drinkers in bars and found that drinking alcohol reduced “um,” though the method is somewhat impractical for everyday use: to become fully umless, a drinker would need to drink nineteen beers.

  It appears that every type of spoken disfluency also exists in signed language. In Deaf culture, slips of the hand are opportunities to make a joke or feel embarrassed, and signers who often fill their pauses are considered distracted. To make the sign for “um” in American Sign Language, hold your dominant hand in front of you, palm facing up, your five fingers slightly apart. Now circle your forearm away from you and return it, repeating the gesture. Cathy Williams, a sign language interpreter, was once at a convention signing for a speaker who repeatedly said “um.” Normally, she’d leave it out, but the speaker used it so much that it was a distinctive mark of his style. So she signed it. As the speech went on and Williams kept making this sign, a deaf person in the audience became agitated, apparently distracted. After the presentation he confronted her, and the next day he followed her around the convention hall, shouting at her (in sign) that she was a terrible interpreter. Williams explained that she was obliged to sign the speaker’s style. “It was so noticeable with that speaker,” Williams says, “that if I was going to give the message accurately I had to include the ‘um.’”

  In other words, to get rid of the “um,” it’s necessary to understand that it means something, not that it means nothing. For Doreen Hamilton, a communication guru who works with Lee Glickstein, speakers can eliminate their “uhs” and “ums” if they understand why the pause fillers are significant to them. “Conscious or not, when an ‘um’ is uttered it is a signal that uncertainty and anxiety is lurking around the corner,” she once told workshop facilitators. “Stepping into the silence and letting go of the filler is courageous.” Even as the “um” remains, its meaning will change.

  6

  Well Spoken

  In the absence of any precise knowledge about Toastmasters, I long assumed they were men who met for ceremonial drunkenness. Secret handshakes wouldn’t have surprised me. Hats with tassels. Go-carts.

  But they turned out to be seekers. Toastmasters, a self-help public-speaking club founded more than eighty years ago, is to public speaking what General Electric is to lightbulbs. The market for public speaking improvement is substantial, mostly because in many corporations and other organizations employees can rise only if they can present information effectively. The yellow pages of the phone book are filled with speaking coaches and trainers, and Web sites abound with books, videos, and DVDs. Yet it’s an industry that operates without oversight or certification—there’s no licensing board or national exam, and no one really knows how many coaches or classes are out there. As a result, when people try to make good on their promise to get better at speaking in public, it’s natural that they’d turn to the known name.

  Founded in 1924, Toastmasters International currently has about two hundred thousand members in 180 countries; 52 percent are women (before 1973, when segregation by gender was banned, there were all-women groups called Toastmistresses), and 82 percent have a college degree. Its influence is widespread—it’s said that millions have done the program. All told, there are about 10,000 clubs, 150 of them affiliated with churches, 2,453 affiliated with companies, and 71 sponsored by prisons, where inmates learn to make arguments and deliver speeches. Thirty percent of the club’s membership lives outside the United States, and the bulk of the club’s recent growth occurred in Asia and the Middle East, where people want to pr
actice speaking English. In the 1920s, people joined Toastmasters to make themselves more competitive in face-to-face business relationships. Today, non-English speakers abroad want to make it in the global business world that depends on English.

  The overall ethos of the club is optimistic self-improvement. What Toastmasters train to do, we all train to do at some level: produce speeches that are smooth and well-practiced, reflecting the tone of the board room more than the tumult of the soapbox or the fire of the pulpit. On a continuum of the raw and the cooked, the good Toastmaster speech is fully cooked, the product of a voice, a vocabulary, and even a body that’s fully under control and disciplined. According to the accounts, the training works. In 2000, a graduate student at the University of Nevada named Ellen Beth Levine Bremen surveyed 343 Toastmasters to see what the program had done for them. Fifty-one percent of the people who responded said that they felt their speaking had improved—they considered the quality of their voice, their eye contact, body posture, and hand gestures to be better. Forty percent said that their fear of public speaking was “significantly reduced,” but only 15 percent of the respondents agreed with other statements such as “I am better at using humorous material,” “I am an improved impromptu speaker,” “I have become a better and more organized speaker,” and “I use fewer ‘ahs and ums.’”

  The self-help benefits of Toastmasters are most dramatically apparent, both figuratively and literally, in prisons. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 1993, members of prison-sponsored clubs find their way out of lives of crime. In one medium-security Louisiana prison, the Phelps Correctional Center in Dequincy, only one of eighty Toastmaster members returned to jail (well below the national recidivism rate at the time of 70 percent). Prisoners find new ways to talk to prison staff and set themselves apart from other inmates. “In prison you’re surrounded by illiterate people who are not so pleasant or cultured,” said one prisoner, Michael Bryant, who had stabbed a man. “We try to stay away from that. We use words like ‘assuage,’ ‘phantasmagoric’ and ‘castigate’ all the time.” Some of the members had been educated before prison but most had discovered Toastmasters and the intellectual challenges of performance and persuasion while behind bars. Said one warden: “They’re so used to lying, they can give speeches with so much feeling.”

  One Atlanta prisoner’s faith in the power of speaking turned Toastmasters’ true-blue American optimism into a convict’s delusions of innocence. “If all the people in here spoke better, they wouldn’t be here,” said Michael Damien, who had joined Toastmasters to prepare for the (inevitable, he said) overturning of his life sentence for murder. He expects that when he’s finally released, he’ll be talking to reporters. “Toastmasters is helping me prepare.”

  At their annual conference, Toastmasters International holds an international public-speaking contest, which it bills as the “World Series of public speaking, the Olympics of oratory, the final bout for the heavyweight title of World Champion of Public Speaking.” It’s been held every year since 1938 except for 1944 and 1945. In 2004, I went to the contest, which was held in Reno, not to hear the contestants as much as to listen for verbal blunders in a social context. Toastmasters prepare for speeches intensively, even for relatively informal presentations. Practice, they believe, is the key to good speaking. (Other approaches to public speaking, such as Lee Glickstein’s, are closer to jazz improvisation; do come prepared but don’t map out every sentence, pause, or joke; do be prepared to be with your listeners in their moment.) I wanted to see what standard Toastmasters train for. Given their level of preparation, do they make room for errors, and if so, what kind? How do Toastmasters define what makes a good speaker—and how do they frame what they treat as verbal blunders and what are they willing to let slide?

  I needed a guide to the contest and was lucky to find David Brooks, who won the championship in 1990 and proudly bears the title “World Champion of Public Speaking” on his Web site. He’s an expert on the contest and is so fond of talking about its history and strategies for winning and what life is like as a World Champion that I wondered, as I listened to him, what he talked about before he won. He’s a tall, slim man, about fifty years old, with a broad wave of graying hair that sweeps boyishly across his face. In his baritone voice, Brooks speaks quickly and crisply, a slight trace of Dallas, his hometown, in his vowels. Obeying his Toastmaster training, he doesn’t say “uh” or “um” and rarely restarts a sentence, though he often repeats words at the beginning of sentences. (“By God, these guys learn how to get rid of [ums and uhs],” Herb Clark told me. “Often at some other expense. They have to go do other things to deal with the problems they usually use ‘uh’ and ‘um’ for.”) A former high school journalism teacher and public relations director, Brooks makes his living as a professional speaker and loves language protectively. When the waiter serving us breakfast said, “Very well, guys,” Brooks muttered, “Good. It should be good.” He might have rolled his eyes a little. “Some people overcorrect.”

  His winning speech in 1990 was an old-fashioned jeremiad, calling his audience back to moral values that American society had abandoned. Probably no one repented, but it didn’t matter: Brooks won the championship. After seven more years of building a business as a professional speaker, delivering uplifting keynote addresses and day-long seminars on good writing and speaking, he made the jump to becoming a professional speaker, traveling to Bahrain, Ireland, and Hong Kong. He’s also a championship guru, an avid student of the contest who advises contestants every year. In Austin, Texas, where he lives, he’s not well known outside of Toastmaster circles, but thousands of Toastmasters all over the world revere him. In Reno well-wishers mobbed him. “I guess I’m a rock star,” he said with reluctant delight.

  The road to Reno began about 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece, where Athenians developed a tradition of using persuasive language, or rhetoric, to shape the course of events, to claim power, and to mete out justice and shame. The first handbooks for public speaking appeared in the fifth century BCE by two Sicilian authors, Corax and Tisias, to help ordinary men plead their own cases in court. Itinerant teachers of various subjects, including rhetoric, called the sophists, brought these handbooks to Athens; the sophists were the first in Greece to teach for hire. Works by Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Isocrates (436–338 BCE), and Plato (429–347 BCE) also taught and debated the precepts of persuasive language. Although many Greek thinkers believed that the ability to wield words was an inborn talent, others believed it could be taught and practiced in public venues—an egalitarianism that was a founding tenet of Athenian democracy. Toastmasters is an heir to this Greek tradition, particularly to the strain that treats rhetoric as a craft—a skill that you can learn, perhaps not in a few weeks, but with the long, hard work of nearly embarrassing yourself to death with every phrase and gesture.

  People now tend to think of ancient rhetoric as a noble pursuit but find contemporary forms of persuasive language—advertising and propaganda, most of all—to be inconvenient at least and dangerous at worst. The ancient Greeks, who were afraid that the persuasive language they prized might work too well, first voiced these same fears. Around 414 BCE, the early rhetorician Gorgias warned that speech could charm, like witchcraft. It also worked like a drug, creating emotions in listeners that they couldn’t control. “For just as different drugs dispel different secretions…so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearer bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.” Gorgias made these comparisons in a famous speech that excused Helen of Troy for giving in to Paris, because Helen had been as susceptible to persuasive language as to violent force or even falling in love.

  Ancient Rome inherited the Greek rhetorical tradition, and Cicero and Quintilian became its most eminent teachers of rhetoric and oratory. Cicero fought political and rhetorical battles to defeat conspirators trying to overthrow the Roman Republic, while Quintilian, born about ei
ghty years later, practiced law and wrote about how to properly educate the good speaker. These Greek and Roman conventions were adapted in medieval Europe, then again in colonial America, where they were transformed by life in a frontier democracy, practiced in frontier churches, infused with African American traditions, and were even influenced by Native American oratory. In the twentieth century, urbanization and the importance of business, as well as the rise of the mass media, also changed how people spoke and wrote.

  One of the most durable ancient conventions of speech was a speaker’s style. Cicero considered the ability to produce sentences thick with imagery and allusions to be the Roman orator’s essential tool. Embellishing a subject was the central task of eloquence, he said, which could make the smallest thing seem significant or the best thing not very good at all. Perhaps Cicero, who honed his skills arguing legal cases, found that it was effective to overwhelm listeners with metaphors, poetic images, repetition, and artful deviations from proper grammar. By his own admission, Cicero wasn’t a fluent speaker—he was prone to nervousness when he began a speech—but he knew how to articulate the importance of patriotism to the Roman Republic. In Cicero’s world, copious speaking was put in service of patriotic goals, hence its virtue—in other words, copiousness was not essentially more beautiful or persuasive than other styles, but it became associated with desirable social values and their prestige.