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

by Erard, Michael.

  Dwight Eisenhower was often mocked for his rambling sentences, though he didn’t appear in Schafer’s blooper books. A parody of the Gettysburg Address à la Ike (“I haven’t checked this figures but eighty-seven years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set up here in the country, I believe it covered certain eastern areas….”) ran in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, a Nevada newspaper, and mock reports from the Society for the Completion of Thoughts and Sentences also ran in The New Republic. All this because Ike tended to repair his sentences, interrupting himself so he sounded like “Well, it wasn’t on his desk yet. It was a report that had—well, he didn’t know whether it was a report. It was a study—he had—as he had seen it—and it had been going back and forth—and they had been going at it for a long time. And it wasn’t ready at this moment—at least, for publication—and its eventual destiny—he had forgotten the details.”

  Eisenhower was the first television president: he campaigned via television, held the first televised press conference, and hired a television consultant.*46 His persistent self-interruptions and repairs—many of which were televised and transcribed—made people suspect that he wasn’t up to the intellectual demands of the presidency. Until the 1970s, historians thought he’d played the role with neither catastrophe nor stunning success. Later scholars began to wonder if he had deliberately employed syntactic loop-de-loops as a hallmark of his style. As new historical materials became available (and as the memory of his blundering faded), a consensus emerged: Eisenhower may not have been a rousing speaker, but he wielded his ambiguity deliberately in order to fend off the tough questions. That took rhetorical skill.

  For instance, before one press conference, Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, was concerned that reporters would ask Eisenhower whether or not the United States would use atomic weapons against China to defend American allies in Taiwan.

  “Don’t worry, Jim,” Eisenhower said. “If that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.”*47

  Ike had a linguistic foil: Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat and governor of Illinois who ran against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Though Stevenson was a paragon of public eloquence, he suffered in the nascent television age because he refused to pay attention to the new rules. If Eisenhower was mocked for his “garbled syntax” (the single most common phrase used to describe Eisenhower’s speaking style), then Stevenson had a reputation for speaking too loftily. Sometimes his reputation worked to his advantage—people admired him, even those who eventually voted for his opponent. His own adviser, George Ball, criticized him for spending so much time writing and rewriting his speeches, not shaking hands or greeting local dignitaries. In both of his national campaigns, Stevenson refused to shorten his speeches for television. On election night, in 1952, he held a televised fireside chat, which he’d agreed to begrudgingly. But he’d spent so much time reworking his text (“We used to tell him that he would rather write than be president,” Ball wrote in his memoir) that it outgrew the allotted time. The networks cut him off five minutes before he was finished.

  The American tradition of public speech in the political sphere holds that the powerful are also the eloquent. But as television displaced the face-to-face meeting as the exemplary venue in which communication takes place, it gave more power to the succinct, the catchy, and the glib. What Stevenson didn’t grasp was that mass media was also mass interaction. His eloquence was never extemporaneous, for example, even though he was credited with raising the intellectual level of presidential campaigns. (It was during the 1952 campaign that the epithet “egghead” was invented for him. He responded with a good-natured play on a famous line from Karl Marx: “Eggheads of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!”) By contrast, Eisenhower often faced reporters without a script, expecting to speak spontaneously about questions they lobbed to him.

  Yet those transcripts were transcribed verbatim and then provided to the press, often after being cleaned up by James Hagerty. Otherwise, unedited transcripts made Eisenhower’s speaking look awkward. In his memoir, Arthur Larson, Eisenhower’s speechwriter, defended the president’s style of speech as an artifact of these transcripts. “Before anybody makes fun of the alleged garbled syntax of Eisenhower’s answers as literally reported syllable by syllable in the papers,” Larson wrote, “let him just once read an equally literal stenographic transcript of something he himself has said, in a congressional hearing, or in an extemporaneous speech, or on a witness stand.” As George Mahl’s experimental subjects knew, the faithfully transcribed speech makes the speaker look like a garbler.

  So what was Eisenhower actually like as a speaker? In August 1957, a young scholar of political communication, Thomas C. Kennedy, sat about six feet away from Eisenhower, who was giving a speech to greet new Republican staff members of Congress. (Kennedy was also headed to Congress to do research.) By that point, Kennedy had spent fifteen years evaluating student speeches, so he couldn’t help but evaluate the man standing at the podium, who, to Kennedy, didn’t at all resemble the president known for his gnarled self-interrupting style: he moved from side to side, occasionally gesturing with his right hand, and once or twice looked at the ground to recall his next topic. His voice was loud enough (Kennedy opined), and it rose and fell appropriately. That day he didn’t repair, wasn’t ungrammatical, and didn’t deviate from standard English. “In the classroom,” Kennedy wrote in the crisp analytical article he published later, “its equal would earn a solid A.”

  Meredith Conover started working for Schafer in 1977, when his blooper empire had grown to include a Dial-a-Blooper hotline, a mail-order business, and plans for a game show. She would come into the office around 8:40; Schafer showed up at 9, and the phones started ringing. Johnny Carson. Milton Berle. Merv Griffin. After more than forty years in broadcasting, he knew everybody. “They wanted him to have the material—it was good free advertising,” Conover said. “People used to send outtakes all the time. There was so much stuff, you couldn’t believe.”

  By then the public’s appetite for bloopers had dwindled, and Schafer’s records weren’t selling as they used to. A California disc jockey, Barry Hansen (better known as Dr. Demento) told me that in the 1970s, when broadcasters began to speak more casually, broadcast blunders became less worthy of notice. The faults, in other words, became faultables less readily. And as humor became more raw and openly sexual, the comedy of sexual innuendoes dissipated, as if all the entendres and ambiguities had resolved themselves.

  Kermit and Mickey were then living in Coral Gables, Florida, in a two-and-a-half-acre estate with a swimming pool, a tennis court, a studio, and a seven-bedroom modernist manse. They no longer pretended to surveil the airwaves but lived quiet lives, driving a Ford station wagon and going out for Chinese food. They had no children, but they had a spaniel named Muffin and a cat named Fluffin (as in muffing and fluffing lines).

  In 1978, a young woman named Laurie Hannan-Anton, a music student at the University of Miami, was working at a Pier One when a polite, pudgy elderly man with gray hair came into the store. He asked her how the blooper book they had for sale was doing. Laurie asked him why he wanted to know.

  “Because I’m Kermit,” he said.

  “Prove it,” she said.

  He took out his driver’s license, and there it was. They became friends (she collected frog trinkets and was fascinated by someone named Kermit), and he asked her to write music for his theme song, “Blooper Man.” He’d already written the words. Anton wrote a song for the electric piano that, by mixing croon and jingle, the nightclub and the circus, perfectly sums up Schafer’s career. Only on the chorus does the calliope slapstick come out: “Bloop, bloop, bloop, everybody bloops, and it can even happen to you/Bloop, bloop, bloop, everybody bloops, and once you do it it’s hard to undo.” The song sums up the history of the slip of the tongue from Sigmund Freud to Schafer himself (“Then along came Schafer/whom we shout hip, hip, hooray for/ Blooper Man is
his name/Bloopers are the name of his game”) and ends with a blooper:

  “This conclee—

  This conclu—

  This co—”

  (pause)

  “That is all.”

  The next year, Kermit died, and his estate eventually set up a foundation in Kermit’s and Mickey’s names at the University of Miami to give scholarships to students in broadcast media and comedy. We have Schafer to thank, along with Allen Funt, for giving us a taste for metareality, whether it was fake life interfering with real life (in the case of Candid Microphone and Candid Camera) or daily life erupting through the performances (in the case of bloopers). The Blooper Man’s genetic material can be found in reality television as well as in the blooper outtakes on a DVD’s special features. It also lived on when Dick Clark bought the rights to the term “blooper” and agreed to honor Kermit’s memory in each show.

  While Americans had found humor in bloopers, the studios found treasure. Schafer’s radio bloopers and military-film outtakes began their lives as trash, unwanted scraps of tape and other media that no one wanted. When the studios realized that they were sitting on gold mines of material, they wised up, and thanks to Schafer’s invention of the “blooper,” they had a way to repackage the detritus of performances for sale. Al Schwartz, the executive producer of Dick Clark’s blooper shows and specials since 1980, including the show TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, said that a minute of blooper video could cost a few thousand dollars for rebroadcast rights and up to $10,000 once actors, writers, and directors received their fees. Now, he said, the studios can ask as much as $10,000 just for the rebroadcast fees for a minute-long clip. News bloopers are cheap; so are animal bloopers. But bloopers of stars are the most expensive. “The most successful bloopers were the ones that stars made,” Schwartz said, “because people liked to see people who are on a pedestal show their human qualities.”

  Today legal restrictions against showing people’s faces on television without their permission means that Dick Clark Productions employs blooper researchers to find out who owns a certain clip and get their permission to use the blooper. The researchers can spend three weeks to three months finding bloopers and getting legal clearances for a one-hour show.

  Inevitably, a certain amount of blooper material that can’t be cleared goes into an “outtake outtakes” pile, where it waits for its Kermit Schafer to arrive.

  8

  Slips in the Limelight

  In the late 1950s, the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky launched a revolution in the study of language by asking, How do babies learn language? The prevailing idea—that children learn by parroting their parents—couldn’t explain why children develop language so quickly, or why they say novel things they’ve never heard before. As Chomsky argued, there must be basic shapes and formulas of language embedded in human brains by evolution and triggered early in life.

  The new linguistics focused on these basic building blocks and the templates for assembling them, calling them “language competence,” since the blocks and plans made up everything speakers could potentially do with their languages—how you make words, how you put sentences together, how you recognize ungrammatical sentences. Linguists explored this competence and where it came from. Less interesting to them was what people actually say (or sign), which are instances of “language performance.” In the new linguistics, language wasn’t what a speaker does. It’s what a speaker knows.*48

  Chomsky’s basic insight—that the forests of language must come from mental seeds—fundamentally altered how we think about language learning, child psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the evolution of the mind. However, by exploring only competence, linguists ignored a number of interesting everyday features of language, such as how men and women speak differently, or how languages change when speakers come into contact, or where slang comes from. Also irrelevant were slips of the tongue.

  In 1965, Chomsky brushed away real speakers—and speech errors—with a sentence that’s often quoted in full because it gives a taste of his characteristically brusque way of prescribing what linguists should do. “Linguistic theory,” he asserted, “is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic).” In other words, slips of the tongue had no place in the science because they were random anomalies. As random, they had nothing to offer the study of language.

  A great irony in the study of slips of the tongue is that Chomsky’s ideas about language, ostensibly hostile to slips, eventually revived scientists’ interest in speakers’ inadvertent waywardness.

  The most direct reason was that Chomsky freed linguists to philosophize and speculate about language as an abstraction in the mind. The American linguists who preceded him refused to consider language abstractly, or to suppose that unseen mental processes were at work. If a mental process couldn’t be observed or recorded, they refused to talk about it. Sticklers about evidence, they considered any discussion of “mind” to be unscientific. Chomsky changed all that by providing a theory of language in the mind, permitting linguists to talk about unseen mental processes and creating a distinction between what a speaker knows and what a speaker does. This paradigm shift transformed the occasional lapse from a mere curio into evidence that a scientist could ponder; it put on a pedestal what had been kicked around just a short time before. Of course, Chomsky hadn’t intended to provoke interest in speech errors, and he probably would have preferred linguists stay away from slips. But slips were so attractive because through them you could see how the knowing and doing of language were connected—that is, how basic shapes and formulas in the brain turned (or did not turn) into actual words.

  What really cemented slips’ new status was that they could best illuminate some of Chomsky’s own ideas and smooth some persistent wrinkles in his approach. For example, he had posited the existence of basic blocks of language that one couldn’t see or perceive. Slips gave voice to these units. Take the slip “glear plue sky” (for “clear blue sky”). In this slip, entire sounds don’t move; rather, it’s a subpart of a sound, called a “feature,” which moves. The feature involved in “glear plue sky” determines whether the vocal cords vibrate when the consonant is pronounced, which is called “voicing.” In the slip itself, the voicing feature disattaches from the “b” (the voiced), leaving it as “p” (unvoiced). Then the feature attaches to the “k” (unvoiced), making it “g” (voiced). One could accept the existence of what were known as “phonological features” on faith. Or one could look for evidence. Slips of the tongue, in these instances and in many others, were evidence. They allowed linguists to read the hidden architecture of language.

  Well into the 1970s, there was a small boomlet of interest in slips of the tongue—a slip renaissance. People’s tongues weren’t slipping more; the renaissance was made up of scientists who married slips of the tongue to Chomskyan ideas about language. These ideas had also attracted psychologists, who brought their own long tradition of studying slips that stretched from H. Heath Bawden to Karl Lashley, and when they quoted Rudolf Meringer, it gave deeper historical roots to what linguists were trying to do.

  All this raised the profile of verbal blunders—and of verbal blunderers themselves. For many, slips came to stand for the creative potential of language in its purest form: using a finite number of basic building blocks, the human mind was ineluctably driven to combine those blocks in an infinite number of ways. Only a slice of them would be “correct.” Slips amounted to the untapped potential lying dormant in our minds. Cognitive scientist Gary Dell expressed the attitude succinctly: “Slips of the tongue can be seen as products of the productivity of language,” he wrote. “A slip is an unintended novelty.”

  Scientific interest in slips of the tongue might have bubbled along tepidly
if a UCLA linguist named Victoria Fromkin hadn’t arrived to turn up the heat. With her forceful personality and politically astute manner, she persistently explained to linguists why slips mattered. A child of Russian immigrants who grew up in New Jersey and California, Fromkin was from her teens a civil rights and labor activist. She was also an accidental scientist, as she told an oral historian; she went to grad school in linguistics at the age of thirty-eight, encouraged by a friend of a friend. Her belief in social justice might have made her especially attentive to language that would otherwise be forgotten or mocked: for her, all language was meaningful, and everything could be studied. The fact that she began her scholarly career relatively later in life might also have made her more successful in spreading new ideas.

  Among linguists, Fromkin is famous for her personal energy, enthusiasm, and her deep sense of right and wrong. Her adviser, phonetician Peter Ladefoged, called her “the mother of all linguists” in an obituary in 2001. Her linguistics textbook, An Introduction to Language, has sold nearly a million copies and been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, and Dutch. One of her more colorful affiliations was with Sid and Marty Krofft, the producers of psychedelic kids’ television shows such as Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and H. R. Pufnstuf. In the 1970s, Fromkin was contacted by the Kroffts to invent a language for the character of Chaka, the apelike Pakuni character on Land of the Lost. She based Chaka’s language on sounds from West African languages she’d studied (including Hausa, Twi, and Yoruba) and wowed her students when she told them she invented Paku, its six hundred words, and its simple grammar—she claimed that five hundred undergraduates once gave her a standing ovation. With Fromkin’s credentials (in 1978, she was named the vice chancellor at UCLA, the first woman to hold the title), she didn’t need a TV or movie career, but she was hired as a consultant. Her first client was the Volvo Corporation, which wanted to know how to pronounce “volvo” (Americans pronounced it too much like “vulva,” and Fromkin recommended the company promote itself as “vahlvo”), and later she invented a vampire language for the Wesley Snipes movie Blade, which involved teaching the actress Traci Lords her vampire lines by telephone.