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

by Erard, Michael.

  As Jaeger and Stemberger will tell you, collecting slips from your own kids at home is a challenge. On one hand, you don’t want to make your kids self-conscious—or worse, so tentative that they talk less. On the other hand, kids are such a good source of data. And you have to write it down. You’ll forget it if you don’t. Stemberger says he simply kept a notebook open whenever he was around his daughters. Jaeger practiced more surreptitiously, sneaking away from the kitchen table to write down a slip—leaving her then-husband to tease the children: “Somebody made a speech error!! Who made the speech error?”

  The parent in the scientist wants to respect the kids, but the scientist in the parent doesn’t want critics to claim that the data source was sullied or that the children made slips to please their parents. Jaeger still remembers when her son, Bobby, made his first speech error, at one year, seven months. Waving good-bye to his grandmother, he said, “kye…car, bye.” “Of course I got extremely excited over Bobby’s first speech error, like some parents get excited about baby’s first steps,” she said.

  She also recalled the time that her husband was teasing Bobby (then almost six years old) about speech errors. “What’s a speech error?” the father asked.

  “You know!” Bobby said. “Can I do one, please, Mom?”

  Oh great, Jaeger thought. Could he really produce a slip on his own? Maybe I’ve corrupted my data, she worried. She told him to tell her his slip.

  “Cake coffee,” Bobby said, putting the stress on the second word, “COFFee.”

  Cake COFFee?!?! Jaeger wondered.

  “Cake COFFee,” he repeated. “That’s one, ’cuz it’s supposed to be COFFee cake.”

  Jaeger breathed a sigh of relief, because Bobby had blown his error—he’d gotten the stress pattern wrong. The normal stress of compound words is on the first syllable (“COFFee cake,” “BASEball”), and even when the words change places, the stress remains. To pull it off, Bobby should have said “CAKE coffee,” but he didn’t. Did Bobby get a long lecture on English stress? I asked Jaeger.

  “No,” Jaeger replied. “I was overjoyed.”

  Why?

  “It meant he couldn’t consciously make a slip,” she explained. “Even if he had some understanding about compound stress, which would be nuts for a four-year-old, he would have no way of knowing how compound stress would look in a reversed word.”

  The larger point is that all the knowledge in the world about slips and how they work doesn’t prevent them from occurring. “I know everything there is to know about speech errors, and I still make them in great abundance,” Jaeger said.

  Jaeger doesn’t speculate too much about what slips say about her kids, though she acknowledges that they slipped and corrected themselves in ways that reflected their personalities. Lively, talkative Anna developed linguistic skills very early. In technical parlance, she was the “expressive” one. Because she began speaking in two-word utterances at a very young age, her early slips involved more grammar than is typical in fifteen-month-olds. Meanwhile, Jaeger described her two youngest, Alice and Bobby, as more precise people. They are more “referential.” This, too, is reflected in their slips, making errors with individual sounds as they acquired them; they also made slips with individual sounds first, then added word slips and grammatical errors. They also tried to cover up their slips, saving face by explaining why they said something. Once Bobby, almost five years old, told his mother that his imaginary “off” switch was located on his back. “Press stak!” he instructed.

  “Stak?” his mother asked.

  “I said ‘Stop!’” he said, denying his earlier blunder.

  What also emerges from Jaeger’s study is how children learn to repair what they say. Aware of the correct forms at a very early age, children do their best to be correct. They acquire sounds and single words first; they correct those first. This leads to what sound like word repetitions. As their vocabulary grows, they correct word choices gone awry. And when they acquire two-word sentences and then more complex grammar, they correct those, too, all because they’ve acquired that most human of desires: to be recognized, comprehended, understood. Someone may have told them to correct their mistake. But they also do it spontaneously, on their own.

  Of Jaeger’s three children, Bobby was the only one who reportedly learned and used the term “speech error.” At five years old, he was explaining why he should be the first child to take a bath. “Because I was last nast night,” he said, then he laughed. “I made a speech error.”

  If Erving Goffman were alive (he died in 1982), he would remind us that error isn’t solely a linguistic phenomenon. It is sociological as well. We might add that it is something personal also. Both Arnold Zwicky and Jeri Jaeger have illuminated this. To truly grasp how and when error occurs, you have to look beyond the error itself to the standards that sift the correct from the incorrect, the normal from the abnormal. Are they personal standards, which may be erroneous themselves? You also have to understand the standard you are measuring against. Are they standards that a speaker (such as a child) can’t possibly meet?

  Goffman argued that lists of errors tell you little about the context in which the errors are perceived and dubbed “errors.” So merely collecting them can be somewhat misleading. “The way to obtain a corpus of errors is not to start with an intuition as to what a quintessential error is and then seek for some prime examples,” Goffman wrote. Rather, the more accurate strategy is “to force oneself to collect what gets treated as an error, whatever that might be.”

  What gets treated as an error is the result of a mismatch of norms and expectations between speakers and listeners. At home or among friends, such divergences may not have great repercussions, but in the political arena they can be great. As Kermit Schafer knew, broadcast audiences are offended by faults, and if not personally, then for the other guy, who might be. Add to this how politicians manage their listeners’ expectations, and changes in how listeners actually hear political speakers, and you get the most recent installment in the story of verbal blunders: the talking of George W. Bush.

  10

  President Blunder

  In contemporary America there is no more visible verbal blunderer than George W. Bush, forty-third president of the United States. Commentators have remarked upon his tortured syntax, tortured meaning, scrambled syntax, tangled tongues, linguistic loopholes, mangled syntax, mangled English, outright gibberish, verbal goulash syndrome, verbal howlers, flubs, gaffes, bloopers, sins of syntax, misnomers, verbal knots, and verbal clangers, and an occasional column in the political Web magazine Slate has been dedicated to the “Bushism.” Compared to the Reverend Spooner’s, Bush’s blundering is less apocryphal and more a matter of perspective. When Bush served as governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000, people didn’t think of him as a verbal blunderer. And even during his first presidential candidacy, his early verbal gaffes on foreign policy raised eyebrows, but he didn’t emerge as a figure of full-blown verbal comedy until Dan Quayle, former vice president under George H. W. Bush, left the race on September 27, 1999. According to a LexisNexis search, national newspapers and magazines noted Bush’s language gaffes but didn’t explicitly label him a verbal blunderer until Quayle was out of the picture.

  Once labeled by the Washington Post as the “human punch line,” for years Dan Quayle and his phenomenal gaffes overshadowed any contributions he made and reduced the respect he otherwise would have garnered. Whether or not his missteps were real linguistic accidents, they were treated as “doesn’t know better” errors. A near-chronic lapser, Quayle appeared to have few resources at his fingertips, linguistic or intellectual. He also misused the ones he might legitimately claim, such as correct spelling.*60 His reputation ever since has hardly been as cheerfully clubby as the legend built at Oxford around Spooner.

  When the former vice president quit the presidential race, the media filled the resulting vacuum by promoting George W. Bush to the role of linguistic punching bag. Later Bush would be
criticized for his tough-guy talk (“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”), his affected regional pronunciations (“nookyular”), his penchant for stating the obvious (“I’m the decider, and I decide what is best”), and his reliance on stock phrases (“spreading freedom”). But he attracted the most derision for soundbite-able errors that were widely quoted and collected.

  In those days, the verbal blunders called “Bushisms” were recognizable “knows better” speech errors. Grammatical fumbles led to incoherence (such as the famous “I know it’s hard to put food on your family”). In early interviews, he called Kosovars “Kosovians” and Greeks “Grecians.” There’s also the syntactic maze, as when he defended an appearance at fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University in 2000: “I did denounce it,” he said. “I de—I denounced it. I denounced interracial dating. I denounced anti-Catholic bigacy—bigotry…. No, I—I—I spoke out against interracial dating. I mean, I support—the policy of interracial dating.” Some of his flubs were quasi-spoonerisms, such as “terriers and barriffs.” Others were malapropisms, like “misunderestimate” and “subliminable.” Intending to say “infallibility,” Bush said “fallacy,” and intending to say “malfeasance,” he said “malfeance.” Some of the blunders erupt only once, which indicates their “knows better” status—that is, Bush does know the words but in a single instance accidentally speaks the wrong form. What also indicates that these early Bushisms were “knows better” errors is that Bush often repairs or corrects himself, if not always smoothly or successfully. Thus “misunderestimated” didn’t exit his lips smoothly—but was interrupted, after nearly each syllable, sometimes with a pause, sometimes with a repeated syllable, or with “uh,” all of it the sign that his internal blunder monitor was, in fact, working. (In his next sentence, however, he chose “misunderestimated” again and pronounced it fluently.)

  Bushisms aren’t interesting because we need more evidence about how the brain works. They catch our eyes and ears because of the person who makes them and because they say something about us.

  In the early 1990s, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg coined the term “Bushism” to help pummel the speaking of Bush père, whose sentences rambled like broken-down fences.*61 One writer speculated that he suffered from some sort of aphasia.†62 A decade later, his son would be pop-diagnosed as “dyslexic” for the same sort of language behavior. Such amateur diagnoses of deviant language change with the political winds. In the 1950s, Kermit Schafer ignored Eisenhower’s gaffes, but early in George W. Bush’s first term, humorous books, CDs, DVDs, and Web sites filled with Bushisms were best-selling hits; in addition to his column, Weisberg collected Bush fils’s blunders in several best-selling books. The president was perceived not only to be inarticulate but also unable to control his language, a flaw unbecoming in a man with two Ivy League degrees. Whereas the blooper showed a momentary divergence between the media persona and the real person, the Bushism demonstrated that the persona and the real person were hopelessly divorced from the outset. It also marked the sad conflation of the political world with the entertainment world: a politician who couldn’t remember his lines.

  Bush’s political opponents tended to hear his blunders as a sign that he was unfit to serve as commander in chief, that they betrayed minimal expectations of public speaking in a leader. They felt that an articulate leader mattered because they felt they deserved someone who could communicate a vision and call upon a repertoire of images and ideas that they shared with him. It certainly didn’t help that the Texas accent he uses fits a Northern stereotype of Southerners as backwater hicks.

  Bush partisans tended to hear his verbal blunders as a sign of his human fallibility, modesty, and authenticity. A thick-tongued man whose values you can cheer is preferable to a silver-tongued man who, as in the Flannery O’Connor story, seduces you in the hayloft, then runs off with your wooden leg. Democrats made a fatal error by underestimating the power of this appeal, and by assuming that all Americans made the connection between leadership and language style.

  Perhaps the strangest moment in the entire story of Bush-as-verbal-blunderer came in 2002, when two California men, Jim Wessling and John Warnock, began marketing a line of “Talking Presidents” dolls, the first of which was a doll of George W. Bush. Sales boomed when the story broke on the Drudge Report, the Washington, D.C.–based political gossip blog. By Christmastime, they’d sold twenty thousand of the figures, and their Web site, talkingpresidents.com, received six hundred thousand Web hits in a single day. A sound chip embedded in the doll was programmed with seventeen of Bush’s well-known phrases, most of which were patriotic blandishments. But Wessling and Warnock were wise enough to include two Bushisms: “You’re working hard to keep food on your family” and “I will not keep this nation hostile.” (The full quote is “We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.”) Though Warnock and Wessling considered themselves devout Republicans who called Bush “one of America’s true heroes,” the blunders were essential to their political homage, celebrated as part of the cloth from which he was cut. During the 2000 campaign, some Bush campaign staffers wore T-shirts they designed that read, “Major league asshole dyslexic rats for Bush-Cheney. Not a subliminable message. Not paid for by Bush/Cheney 2000.” A video during the Republican National Convention offered Bush chuckling at his gaffes, and in an appearance at Yale’s graduation in May 2001, Bush joked about his speech style: “My critics don’t realize I don’t make verbal gaffes,” Bush told the graduating class, as reported in the New York Times. “I’m speaking in the perfect forms and rhythms of ancient haiku.”

  Perhaps the most important stretch of Bush’s language biography began when an advance version of a Bush profile, written by journalist Gail Sheehy for Vanity Fair, “The Accidental Candidate,” appeared. In her story, Sheehy made the shocking claim that Bush, a class clown who’d compensated for academic weaknesses with social charisma and leadership, had dyslexia. As proof she offered that his brother, Neil, was a confirmed dyslexic. Sheehy also found meaning in the fact that Barbara Bush had actively promoted literacy, a cause one might take up if one had personal experience of a child with reading difficulties. Over the next two months, a firestorm of criticism and name-calling (not only of Bush but of Sheehy and her journalistic credibility) exploded. The Bush campaign eventually appropriated the word as an inside joke—this was the reference to dyslexia on the campaign T-shirts—but not before Bush was asked about Sheehy’s story. Bush’s reaction is well known because he garbled the reply. “The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her,” he said.

  In the first eight months of Bush’s presidency, the media poked good-natured fun at his talking, even making gibes about his Spanish. Yet, after September 11, 2001, criticisms of his speaking ceased, and he gained wide praise for a speech he gave on September 14, shouting into a bullhorn, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” His simple sentences somberly matched the nation’s mood, and his tough talk made Americans feel as if they were in the hands of a leader. He was finally showing himself to be the uniter he had campaigned as. The September 12 mood brooked no frivolity, either. Amid the patriotic fervor of a nation in crisis, criticism of his verbal blunders abated. But as the ramp-up to the Iraq war began in 2003, the verbal criticism resumed. This time, it returned as a punch line for late-night comedians, a tired cliché.

  One of the best trackers of such trends is the founder of www.dubyaspeak.com, a man I will call “Thomas” (he did not want his real name used), who since the 2000 Florida recount has collected Bush blunders, posting them to a Web site with the help of a “very informal group of irregulars.” They verify each blunder against White House transcripts, wire service reports, and audio and video clips. Each blunder is annotated with a sarcastic or quizzical comment, then categorized. With Bush’s statement, “September the 11th changed me. I remembe
r the day I was in the—at Ground Zero, on September the 4th, 2001. It’s a day I will never forget,” Thomas observes: “The day…maybe not, but the date is an entirely different matter.”

  The criticism Thomas has received about the site has varied. Before 9/11, people accused him of being sour that Al Gore lost the election. “People said, the way [Bush] talks is endearing, it’s merely a personality trait. [They said] you’re taking every single thing out of context and blowing it out of proportion,” he said. After 9/11, his patriotism was questioned. Other anti-Bush sites shut down after 9/11, but Thomas never considered closing his.

  If Bush’s coronation as a verbal blunderer was partly an artifact of how closely people scrutinized his speech, then once the scrutinizers were distracted or found other facts, the artifact began to decay. A trial balloon for a full rhetorical rehabilitation came in the spring of 2005, when John McKinnon, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote about Bush’s newfound confidence. McKinnon got Jacob Weisberg to admit that Bushisms were harder and harder to find. Even Thomas agreed about the improvement. “He’s more relaxed now than he has been in the past,” he said, “and he’s more confident in speeches, and that’s resulted in not as many obvious mistakes as in the past.”

  But Bush hasn’t become a better speaker. It’s just that listeners’ expectations have changed. Bush’s public language has also become more formulaic, which reduces the pressure to be spontaneous and fluent. Meetings are highly scripted, to reduce the opportunities for gaffes. Critics no longer need to scrutinize Bush’s speech for evidence of his character. It’s all around us now, the accumulation of his mishaps and mistakes—or, if you prefer, of his steadfast leadership.