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

by Erard, Michael.

  Through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, people wrote Latin and the European vernaculars in the same highly ornate, profuse style, which was thick with stylistic flourishes, classical references, and accumulations of language. For five hundred years, it was the dominant style, taught in schools and perpetuated by the hierarchy of the Roman church. Speakers and writers were trained in the art of profusion, or what was called “copiousness” or “amplification.” It was associated with fertility, wealth, education, and other characteristics of the powerful and wealthy.

  In early America, speech making was an everyday activity, practiced as much by the hangman as the head of the local literary society. Even the condemned orated from the scaffold, a noose looped around their necks. Before many people knew how to read and before public schools were established, newspapers were often read aloud in public, and storytelling, plays, and lectures were popular forms of entertainment. The United States had an oral culture whose robustness stood, as a sort of political metaphor, for the life of the country itself. But frontier life, a lively democracy, and eventually the mass market placed new demands on traditions of speechmaking.

  Americans developed a wide distaste for the verbally florid around the Civil War. The critic Edmund Wilson called it “the cultivation of brevity.” Two rising stars of the new prose style were Abraham Lincoln (in the Gettysburg Address) and Ulysses Grant (in the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant). Wilson argued that their style was a response to the political exigencies of the times, because “they had no time in which to waste words.” The plainer style, with its spare words and faster pace, was considered efficient and functional, the language of action and decision in the political crisis of secession and the subsequent war. After the war, the telegraph, the train, and Greenwich Mean Time accelerated the pace of daily life, which simplified the overblown conventions of speech and writing. In this environment leaders needed to direct their constituencies to action quickly; deliberation or reflection now seemed like a luxury.*39

  A plainer, more muscular style of language was also now being used for advertising and business, as the ordinary man and woman, not the classically (and leisurely) educated, became targets for the sales pitches of the industrial age. Men such as self-help guru Dale Carnegie expressed the urgency of the time in public speaking handbooks he wrote for YMCA schools. “We are in a hurry,” Carnegie wrote. “This is the age of automobiles and aeroplanes and wireless. We are nervous. Have you anything to say? All right, let’s have it at once. Get through with it and sit down.”

  Ralph Smedley recognized the need for speed and directness as well. In 1903, as a college senior, he wrote an essay for the Illinois Wesleyan University newspaper about whether four years of college were too many. He decided they were not—but then, he argued, people should seek education for their whole lives. After graduating with a bachelor of science degree in 1903, he worked for the YMCA in Bloomington, Illinois, where he founded a speech club for boys.*40 One can clearly see the outlines of the Greek rhetoricians in his precepts, as well as those of Quintilian, who defined the good speaker as “a good man speaking well.” As the Toastmasters official history tells it, Smedley spent the next twenty years as a YMCA employee, moving from city to city and becoming a sort of oratorical Johnny Appleseed, planting a public-speaking club wherever he landed. In Freeport, Illinois, for example, he established a club for professional men whose first meeting, held on March 27, 1907, was conceived as a mock farming convention. Though most of the men had had no farming background, they gave hearty speeches like “Corn is king” and “The hog, his nature and values.”

  By Smedley’s time, old-style oratory was mostly gone, surviving in preaching traditions, barnstorming lawyers, and politicians’ stump speeches. In its place rose a new form, with a style all its own: “public speaking.” Smedley and Carnegie†41 believed that the voice of the common man was needed in the business world as well as the political sphere. “In the days when pianos and bathrooms were luxuries, men regarded ability in speaking as a peculiar gift, needed only by the lawyer, clergyman, or statesman,” Carnegie once wrote. “Today we have come to realize that it is the indispensable weapon of those who would forge ahead in the keen competition of business.”

  When Smedley launched his first club, continuing education for adults was growing more popular, and the YMCA was at the fore of this movement.*42 Smedley’s goal: create a nonschool venue where adults could learn new professional skills or other topics in a fun atmosphere. Responsibilities for leading meetings and speaking rotated among the members, who were expected to critique one another’s speeches. In his memoir, Smedley recalled that not all of his YMCA bosses saw the value of his clubs. They treated them “as a sort of peculiarity—an idiosyncrasy—of Smedley’s,” he wrote. In 1922, after years of traveling in various cities and setting up a club in each one, he finally settled in Santa Ana, California. There he established a club whose agenda has passed to every Toastmasters’ meeting since: business announcements, then five-minute prepared speeches, and ten minutes for evaluation of each speech. In 1934, the organization added a round of on-the-spot speeches about current events, called “Table Topics,” to give all members a chance to speak.

  Smedley’s basic premise: you should talk to an audience as you would talk to one person. He called the style “amplified conversation.” It was more interactive than the old-school bombast; you didn’t exhort, perorate, shout, goad, lash, or incite your audience. Instead you spoke to them—ideally, with them. It was an after-dinner style, spoken by the sated to the sated, not rallying the troops into battle. It was pragmatic, suited to the rise of Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions Clubs in the 1920s, as well as the prominence of chambers of commerce, whose weekly lunch and dinner meetings were venues where speakers reaffirmed the values of the organization. Though one’s audience consisted of one’s peers, a speaker didn’t speak informally, use slang, or clip his pronunciation. In a semi-intimate, matter-of-fact way, you told your friends what they already felt, knew, and held dear.

  Smedley also taught rules for delivery, lists of do’s and don’t’s that brought skills to a wide range of students in a brief amount of time. Smedley’s lists were like vitamin injections to boost a person’s eloquence. The list of do’s included brevity and making eye contact; don’t’s included avoiding controversial topics and saying “um.” As Barnet Baskerville notes in The People’s Voice, a history of oratory in America, in the decades before the rise of “public speaking” and commercial values, people had read model speeches collected in anthologies and histories of oratory. By the 1920s, few people had time for a drawing-room sort of self-education. A person had to learn the formula for a good speech, then hit the lecterns.

  Smedley and Carnegie weren’t alone in transforming oratory for the booster age. James Winans at Cornell revived the study of speaking in colleges and also promoted the conversational style. All of them helped adapt public speaking from the political and religious sphere to the business one. At its most practical, Toastmasters would make an individual more competitive in his business and his service club, where he might be called to speak upon anything at any moment. A man could at least survive a request to say a few words—public speaking was no reason for swoons or heart palpitations.

  In the hands of the Toastmasters, public speaking took a turn away from the moral education of the oratorical training of the past. Despite how Socrates chastened the Sophists in Athens for teaching the youth tricks with language, making them more powerful than they were wise and good, the classical rhetorical training had focused on educating the speechmaker—and inculcating them with the community’s moral values. The education of the orator was the education of a soul, and a citizen. Demagogues and charlatans might still exist, but you could hunt them down. After all, when you created good speakers you also created listeners who could discern insidious rhetoric and resist its intoxication. Oratory once attempted to build and reaffirm community. Smedley made it all about the sale.


  “All talking is selling,” Smedley once wrote, “and all selling involves talking, whether it’s written or oral. In all our talking, we are attempting to ‘sell’ information or ideas or inspiration, or some other intangible.” In a Calvinist framework, economic success had been a sign that God had chosen you. Now, it was almost as if you had only to learn the principles of speaking well in public to show that you, too, were one of the chosen.

  Reno was dry and hot but occasional raindrops splashed down from lone clouds overhead as I headed to the Hilton casino. When I arrived, I went straight to the convention and an awards ceremony in the hotel’s ballroom, where a string of emcees with impressive voices read lists of names and made each one ring like a philosophical truth. One set of awards went to people who’d passed the first ring of fire in the Toastmasters’ world: preparing and delivering a series of ten speeches. In 2004, 19,608 people voluntarily did what many Americans say they fear more than death itself. And each of them paid forty dollars (a basic membership fee) for the privilege of doing so.

  Most of the exercises in this basic speech sequence focus on delivery. (Later courses teach more specialized skills.) First there’s the Ice-Breaker, then Be in Earnest. Organize Your Speech helps a speaker organize her thinking, Show What You Mean works on gestures and body language, Vocal Variety explores different ways to use the voice, then Work with Words expands a speaker’s vocabulary range. Apply Your Skills gets a person to combine the techniques, and he or she raises the stakes in Make it Persuasive. Speak with Knowledge is an informational talk. The apogee of the Toastmasters basic training comes in the final speech, Inspire Your Audience, in which you “select a topic about which you feel strongly, analyze your audience’s mood and feelings, and inspire them using all the skills you have developed.” It was this basic speech, five to seven minutes long, that contestants in the world championship would be giving.*43

  One part of the Toastmasters training is eliminating “uh” and “um.” Once speakers became sensitized to its presence, a public-speaking coach or teacher could get them to catch it before it came out of their mouths. Militance is one word you could use to describe the Toastmasters’ attitude about the pause filler. Before one convention event, I chatted with a Toastmaster from New Jersey, a longtime member who sold chemicals for a living. I said something like, “the errors people make when they, uh, speak.”

  “You just said ‘uh,’” he interrupted. Pause.

  “I did, you know,” I admitted. “But conversation is different from formal speaking.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” my new friend said. He leaned closer. “They say not to say it,” he said sheepishly. “I say it sometimes.”

  After the ceremony, I met John Hunt, a Texan friend of David Brooks and an old Toastmasters hand, who had a flattop haircut and was wearing a flannel shirt. An employee for a federal agency, he first became involved in Toastmasters to “improve my writing and leadership skills,” he said, adding that “I already was a ham.” (According to Bremen’s survey, 50 percent of Toastmasters members said they joined “to improve public speaking skills for professional purposes” and 23 percent said they joined to improve speaking skills for “self-esteem and personal reasons.”)

  According to Hunt, Toastmasters helps people’s confidence as speakers. “People know their errors,” he says. “When someone finishes a speech, they know all the places they should have changed. But they need someone to tell them what they did right. And sometimes the hardest thing to do is to evaluate positively. We work on this all the time. The hardest thing to do is to figure out what your peers have done well. Our job is to say, You got up. You spoke. You made sense. Let’s do that again. That’s how we sucker people into doing more speeches. It’s the same dynamic as in gambling,” he said, gesturing toward the hotel’s casino. “You put in a nickel. Nothing. You put in another nickel. You get four back. Are you going to continue?”

  I wandered up to a small bookstore that had been set up for the convention, where piles of Toastmasters paraphernalia were on sale: T-shirts, caps, bumper stickers, ashtrays, sun visors, and coffee mugs, all of them printed with the Toastmasters logo (a globe framed by two gavels and bearing a “T”). There were also official Toastmaster trophies and plaques and stacks of workbooks for speeches. I hoped they’d sell refrigerator magnets with Ralph Smedley standing beatifically at a podium, a sort of oratorical kitsch, but I couldn’t find any. Yet rank-and-file members I met didn’t appear to go in for genuine founder worship, either. I heard only one Toastmaster mention Smedley by name, and that was to complain about how the judges who evaluate the championship speeches are “brainwashed” in Smedley’s teachings.

  All of the brochures radiated a Horatio Alger appeal. It’s a bewitching message: anyone who applies him-or herself has the innate ability to be an engaging and witty speaker. Ralph Smedley believed, in a by-your-bootstraps classic American sort of way, that eloquence can be yours—if you’re willing to work for it. This begged the question of where your eloquence was, if you didn’t have it now. Carnegie located it in childhood. Children had a natural eloquence, he argued, which they lost—or that was stolen from them. “You were born with the ability to express yourself,” he once wrote. “A little child four years of age is able to express anger and love and joy without any drill in public speaking.” How do they get ruined? Carnegie claimed that they are robbed of their natural spontaneity by society, school, and authorities, which turns them into adults who are reluctant, anxious, and slow.

  If the World Championship of Public Speaking represents the verbal barnstorming side of Toastmasters, then David Brooks is the barnstormer’s barnstormer. One of the most knowledgeable students of the contest, he studies patterns and trends in judging and spends hours watching videos of past contests. He has an impressive stash of facts and anecdotes about the championship, which he says he couldn’t win today with his 1990 speech, because the standards keep changing. In the 1980s, contestants started venturing beyond their lecterns, which was a shocking innovation in its day; as I see in Reno, they range the stage like boxers. Brooks says their moves are mapped out on paper and timed to the second.

  Though Toastmasters prize a speaker’s control of his or her setting, voice, and body, they’re also connoisseurs of risk; like acrobats they know a genuinely dangerous stunt when they see one. Brooks likes to tell stories about his own flubs, costume mistakes, and equipment failures. In 1990, a hundred people told him not to wear the “Texas tuxedo” he wanted to wear—string tie, blue jeans (usually starched and pressed), and cowboy boots. Such an outfit was a radical informality. “And after I won, the same hundred people told me it was a great idea,” Brooks says.

  In 1999, Craig Valentine gave a speech that contained a dialogue between him and his conscience, back and forth. “It starts slow but becomes rapid fire. It was so”—Brooks paused, in awe still—“tightly constructed, like you were listening to two different people. I thought: this is like crossing a highwire without a net.” Valentine won. (He is now a motivational speaker and president of a consulting firm.) Two years later, a contestant from Boston named Darren LaCroix, a stand-up comic who joined Toastmasters to get more time onstage, opened with the line, “Have you ever had an idea,” and then fell face-first on the floor, where he stayed while he said his opening lines. The basic Toastmasters speech is highly formalized; after the opener, the speaker acknowledges the emcee and the audience. LaCroix did this prone. “He had the courage to stay there, to play it out seconds after what anyone should have done,” Brooks said. “He won the contest in that first minute.”

  “Today’s American audiences want information in an entertainment package,” Brooks added. In Europe and Asia, adults don’t need a stand-up comedy routine to be tricked into learning. “In Europe, you can stand behind a lectern and read from notes and most people will like it,” he says. “I spoke at Volvo once in Sweden and when it was all over, they said, ‘We like you. You’re not a typical American speaker. Y
ou have knowledge, and you can give it to us in a format that’s not an over-the-top style.’ An American style is not a compliment—that means you’re showy, and preachy, but light on content.”

  The night before the contest, he invited me to eat dinner with three other world champions who were in Reno. Going through the buffet line, they joshed one another constantly like regular guys after a day of gambling. Once they sat down at the table their magnetism and charm was so strong I could hardly eat. Along with Brooks and LaCroix was Ed Tate, who had been a successful professional speaker before his championship, and Jim Key, a lanky man with a shaved head who won in 2003. The son of a minister, he was inspired by management guru Zig Ziglar to take up inspirational speaking. He placed second in 2001 and 2002, then in 2003, asked Brooks to be his coach. That year, Key won.

  Ed Tate (the 2000 champion) is an intense African-American man who used to be a computer executive and corporate trainer. Now he’s a professional speaker whose client list reads like the Fortune 500. All four always seem to be on the look-out for ways to leverage their champion status—Key wants to leave his day job, Brooks likes to travel overseas to speak to audiences at companies and Toastmaster conventions, while Tate and LaCroix upped their speaking fees and now ask more than seventy-five hundred dollars per speech. LaCroix, a short, bald man in rimless glasses, explains that’s how years of investment are paying off. “I used to drive two and a half hours to Portland, Maine, for five minutes onstage, and now I get paid extremely well for a one-hour keynote,” he said. “It’s not for the one hour—it’s for all the two-and-a-half-hour drives which allowed me to develop a skill to change the way an audience thinks in an hour. That’s our value—when we’re done talking, the audience will have changed the way they think.”

  They talked about their favorite audiences. “Women,” LaCroix said immediately. Of course, I said, if you’re a public-speaking rock star and they’re showing up at your hotel door. I was joking, but LaCroix corrected me. “It’s not about that, it’s about what they’re like in audiences,” he said. “Women are more boisterous, they’re more open with their laughter. I’d rather speak to an all-female audience—”