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

by Erard, Michael.

  For their part, linguists were not that critical of Bush. In a 2002 commentary for the NPR show Fresh Air, Geoff Nunberg distinguished “thinkos” from “typos” and said it’s hard to tell them apart. (A “thinko” corresponds to what I’ve been calling a “doesn’t know better” error; a “typo” is a “knows better” one.) Nunberg argued that Bush’s pronunciation of “nuclear” was a “typo par excellence” but in the end was probably just “a bit of borrowed Pentagon swagger.” As for the Bushisms, linguists knew better than to think them abnormal. “What happens with Bush is that some people are listening for mistakes,” Arnold Zwicky told me. “I haven’t done any comparison with Bush as opposed to someone else, but I wouldn’t expect it would be hugely different from any random person.”

  Invisible factors alerted the American public to listen more sensitively and completely to Bush’s linguistic faults. For one thing, Americans seem to hold ideals about how their presidents should speak—witness the presidents in the movies, for instance, who bestow the charisma of the actor on the actual office. Not only are these ideals at odds with how real presidents have spoken, but for less than half of the country’s existence have Americans been in a position to actually hear their president speaking. Given how highly we regard the Founding Fathers, it may surprise people to learn that in June 1776, when representatives of thirteen American colonies met at the Continental Congress to discuss what criticisms they should send to King George, they gave the job of writing a declaration of independence to a verbal bungler with a lisp from Virginia who, though he was intellectually prodigious (he could read Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, and Old English, he didn’t read newspapers, opting instead for classical historians like Thucydides and Tacitus, and he began reading Plato’s Republic when he was seventy-one years old—in the ancient Greek of the original), was an anxious public speaker and an apprehensive talker: Thomas Jefferson.

  Jefferson, who eventually served as the new nation’s third president, wrote a letter to a friend when he was nineteen years old describing his encounter with the woman he loved. He’d prepared comments “in as moving language as I know how,” but he flubbed his romantic lines. “But, good God!” Jefferson wrote. “When I had an opportunity of venting [my thoughts], a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder, and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the too visible marks of my strange confusion.” The young woman, Rebecca Burwell, eventually spurned Jefferson for another man. Because he blundered? The historical record doesn’t say.

  John Adams, the second president of the United States, father of John Quincy Adams (“Old Man Eloquent” himself), recalled that during the time he and Jefferson spent together as members of Congress, he never heard Jefferson say more than three sentences in a row. Jefferson’s biographers noted that in conversation, his voice could be pleasant and modulated. Given how widely read and well traveled he was, he lacked nothing to talk about. There is no evidence that he did not meet the eighteenth-century expectation that intelligent people could hold excellent conversations. But when he got up to speak in public, his voice “sank in his throat” and turned “guttural and inarticulate,” as his eulogist, William Wirt, described it. As president, he delivered both of his inaugural addresses in a whisper. He was so uncomfortable with public speaking that he wrote out his State of the Union addresses and sent them to Congress, where they were read by a clerk. No American president delivered a State of the Union address directly to Congress until Woodrow Wilson.

  Writing in 1922, the historian Carl Becker described Jefferson’s quality of starting and stopping his sentences, in perpetual revision as he spoke. Becker suggested that Jefferson was too intelligent to be a good speaker. “One who in imagination hears the pitch and cadence and rhythm of the thing he wishes to say before he says it,” he wrote, “often makes a sad business of public speaking because, painfully aware of the imperfect felicity of what has been uttered, he forgets what he ought to say next. He instinctively wishes to cross out what he has recently said, and say it over again in a different way—and this is what he often does, to the confusion of the audience.” George Mahl might say that Jefferson was a chronic sentence-changer, not someone who said “um.”

  Not all Jefferson historians have been comfortable with these assessments, which are foreign to Jefferson’s enduring image; the historian Daniel Ross Chandler, for example, called them “unfortunate and regrettable,” and cited Jefferson’s ideas for their intellectual merit, his long history of public service, and his private charm. It’s true that even if Americans knew about Jefferson’s speaking style, his reputation as a Founding Father and Enlightenment polymath would likely not suffer. Jefferson, who spoke well before the era of the mechanical reproduction of the human voice, is spared the judgment that we reserve for public figures whose speeches are engraved in analog or digital form.

  We have surprisingly little access to the actual sound of the voices of the people who serve as models of presidential eloquence—and whom we hold up to judge modern presidents such as Bush, who was regularly critiqued as sounding “unpresidential.” But what does a president, or any other politician, sound like to the popular American ear? We know more about the history of political speaking than the history of political listening. Such a history might show how blunders produced emotional effects and political situations that were desirable; how twangs, drawls, and dialects provided entrée to power, not exclusion from it; and how garbled syntax and obfuscation have given people power they might not otherwise have had.*63

  Curiously, Jefferson’s spoken ineloquence at the Continental Congress had a positive outcome for the nascent nation: to compensate for his discomfort with the spoken word, the Virginian developed writing skills recognized by other colonial leaders. Because Jefferson had participated little in the spontaneous speech making, and because Benjamin Franklin, another potential author, was ill, Jefferson was chosen to draft a declaration of independence. (He also had some ideas about the natural rights of the people.) He was also asked to read his completed draft aloud to the assembled colonial representatives. It isn’t clear whether he did this himself or had someone else do it. We do know that on June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud, and that the actual copy that was read has disappeared. We also know that Jefferson wanted the Declaration to be enunciated in a particular way, and he added marks to the text that looked like single and double quotation marks floating above the sentences between words. Revolutionary-era printers, mistaking these marks for quotation marks, included them in some early printed versions of the Declaration. Historians later realized these were oratorical notations, probably Jefferson’s reminders to himself. Some believed that they were stress marks for certain words and phrases. But in 1993, Stanford literary critic Jay Fliegelman argued that these marks indicated pauses. In other words, Jefferson had scored the document with prompts to help him achieve a natural-sounding spoken performance.

  To explain the factors that attuned listeners to Bush’s speaking, we should also trace the evolution of our taste for knowing a president’s exact words and why we place so much power in the verbatim. Calvin Coolidge was the first president with a policy against being quoted verbatim, probably because he realized that the mass media, which was becoming increasingly important, would all too faithfully broadcast his blunders. He met weekly with members of the press to explain government policies and political developments but kept his exact words private. The reporters weren’t allowed to quote Coolidge directly (they often quoted him but didn’t attribute the quotes to him) or even write down his exact words. Coolidge didn’t feel his privacy was at stake; it was the weight that he knew could be given to presidential diction. In one exchange recorded by a White House stenographer, Coolidge barked at a reporter he saw sneaking shorthand notes.*64

  “Are you taking down in shorthand what I say?”

  “Yes, sir,” the reporter replied.

  “Now I don’t think that is right,” Coolidge said.
“I don’t think that is the proper thing to do. Who do you represent?”

  “David Lawrence,” the reporter replied.

  “Well, I wish you would tell Mr. Lawrence that I don’t think it is the right thing to do…I don’t object to you taking notes as to what I say, but I don’t quite throw my communications to the conference into anything like finished style or anything that perhaps would naturally be associated with a presidential utterance,” Coolidge said.

  If he expected to be quoted verbatim, he would “want to give considerable thought to and perhaps throw a little different form of language.”

  Coolidge would go on to be the first U.S. president whose words were broadcast on the radio—on December 6, 1923, millions of people tuned in to listen to him speak. Some historians have said that he was soundly reelected the following year as a result. Later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, frustrated with being misquoted by reporters, installed the first recording system in the Oval Office. Harry Truman explicitly forbade verbatim quoting by journalists.

  Yet the end of the twentieth century brought a growing taste for the vérité, perhaps to counter the feeling that mass media offerings were scripted, simulated, and inauthentic. Reality television shows like Big Brother, The Real World, and Survivor became popular with audiences and networks alike as people discovered the appeal of unscripted reality (albeit a heavily edited one). It was also a time when Americans were reading more transcripts: in 1974, they could read hundreds of pages of Nixon’s White House tapes, which flattered the president as little as his 1960 television debate with John Kennedy did. The flurry of verbatim depositions from Kenneth Starr, published as the Starr Report, was also a best seller, as much because of its shocking, titillating contents as for its verbatim presentation. The vérité style puts the stamp of truth on things because it seems unmediated by human judgments. It is the closest that written language can come to photography. Yet a vérité quote, just like a photograph, is the product of choices by people about what to include or exclude. The “natural” depends on how invisible the choices are kept.

  Journalists, who bring the words of powerful people to the rest of us, have a peculiar relationship to vérité quoting. Normally they are required to present solely facts, a principle that becomes difficult to implement or defend when representing speaking. Vérité quotes aren’t often readable. Moreover, they can make people look more stupid or low class than they actually are. Yet journalists’ palette of literary techniques has always included the verbatim quote. A recent profile in the New York Times of painter Cy Twombly captured his feelings about his past with beautiful swiftness. “‘I loved basic,’ he said of his army training. ‘It was so regulated.’ But then the army sent him to cryptography school, which he said put him under severe strain. ‘It’s very exacting,’ he said. ‘I’m not—it’s very, very—they—you know.’”

  As a novice reporter, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis was told not to quote verbatim. “I was told when I started,” he wrote in an e-mail, “not to use ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ or words that reflected a particular accent in a demeaning way.” The Washington Post’s David Broder agreed that in most cases, verbatim quoting was to be avoided. “Leaving the ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ isn’t useful to the reader, because we all do that when we speak,” Broder said. He also explained that before microcassette recorders and minidisc players, reporters who attended the same event would typically gather afterward, comparing notes and agreeing on a version of what was said. Now the technology allows reporters to work autonomously; they check their notes against their recordings—or, often, against the official transcripts, which are themselves cleaned up.

  Yet, in 2000, unforeseen factors made the vérité quote fashionable again. In the January 31, 2000, New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann published a profile of George W. Bush that reproduced large chunks of Bush’s speaking, apparently verbatim. Lemann also focused on the quality of Bush’s voice. “His voice isn’t a fabulous instrument, either: the range of tone and volume is too flat; it lacks richness and roundness,” he wrote. Lemann’s attention to linguistic detail was the result of having limited time to interview the presidential candidates, whose language was unusually rehearsed and managed that year. Any spontaneous behavior, no matter how small, took on amplified importance—particularly the blurts and blunders. Whenever access to a candidate was curtailed or when the candidate resisted a journalist’s probing, the verbatim quotes would serve for a greater proportion of the raw material of portraiture.

  Bush supporters complain that vérité portrayals of their candidate suffered at the hands of reporters with a liberal bias. In 1999 and 2000, however, it was a tool for evaluating all politicians. Lemann performed the same analysis of Gore, quoting huge amounts of the candidate talking. And in March 2000, the New York Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye quoted Al Gore as saying “Uh, I, I, my message is for the, the voters of the country. Uh, I ask for their support. I’m not taking a single vote for, for granted.’” Gore had been responding to a question that caught him off guard, which Seelye said she wanted to capture. “I was trying to convey that he wasn’t prepared to say anything that he hadn’t scripted,” she said.

  Along with his actual blunders and the apparent vogue for vérité style of quoting, George W. Bush was also crowned as a verbal blunderer because he was a canary in the linguistic coal mine. Just as Mrs. Malaprop was a sign of her times, so was George Bush. The rise of Bush-as-blunderer occurred in a context in which, according to the U.S. Census, in 2000, one out of five Americans spoke a language other than English at home. By 2010, the number may rise to one out of four. Half of these will speak Spanish. More than two dozen states and numerous cities have passed either English-only or antibilingual education laws, while the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission has investigated increasing numbers of workplace language discrimination cases, all of which point to simmering anxieties over the connections among language, citizenship, patriotism, and belonging.

  The anxiety also includes questions about literacy and language standards. Is there a standard language anymore? E-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and cell phone communications have created forms of language that often offend traditional sensibilities, particularly because these devices are adopted by the young. To challenge adult culture, the young create vocabularies and grammars that are as different as possible from adult usages. Educators constantly bemoan the lack of spelling and reading skills. Meanwhile, anxieties about language diversity and the standard language are also converging. The United States has never had an official language, though census figures and fears about immigration continually energize the movement to pass a federal law.

  Dialects, jargon, and slang continue to proliferate in ways that affect communities and families, whether they speak only English or other languages, too. For every punctuation vigilante who bemoans the imminent demise of Western civilization because the apostrophe gets misused at the supermarket (“Orange’s for sale!”), a Mexican-born father is telling his daughter to speak pure Spanish, not to mix in English words, while Chinese parents are waking up their sons on Saturday mornings to go to Chinese school to learn how to read and write Chinese characters. Not all immigrants decide to retain their mother tongue, but the point is that the gatekeepers of standard English aren’t the only ones worried about linguistic purity. This is the story of language in America, a place where language loyalties have always been tested.

  The case of Bush is a perfect example of what happens when the norms and expectations of speakers and listeners diverge. In recent years, a broader set of social and cultural factors (an accelerated news cycle that increases the scrutiny on the president’s every word, our increasing access to presidents as talkers as well as orators) changed public expectations. This was exacerbated by the fact that once the public’s opinion is fixed, one’s reputation as a speaker is hard to change. Clinton’s speaking was also overparsed for evidence of slipperiness, and no matter what Al Gore does, he is doomed to play A
dlai Stevenson to W.’s Ike, promising liberation to imaginary eggheads. One is left to wonder how the real person behind the persona feels about his public reputation, how he attempts to manage it, and if he pays attention to it at all.

  To build up, preserve, undermine, or even question the linguistic legacy of Bush can hardly be done without being accused of having a political agenda. Yet in a nonpartisan sense, evaluating his linguistic performances in light of the political agendas of both Right and Left highlights social attitudes about language that are directly relevant to questions about power, who has it, and who doesn’t.

  On one hand, criticizing how smart or competent or moral a person is because he or she doesn’t speak like you do (or as you expect them to) smears a larger set of people than you’d think, including nonnative speakers of English, stutterers, people with diseases that impact their motor control, and the elderly. Liberals shouldn’t talk about speaking this way—it contradicts how they work to include everybody and make sure that everyone has equal opportunity. Also, long after public figures who have have been criticized for their linguistic abilities are gone from the public stage, people who speak differently will still be around. We ourselves may even be among them, hoping we don’t get smeared for the way we talk too.

  On the other hand, anyone who believes in upholding any sort of standard should neither accept nor reward public figures who speak in a way that doesn’t match their listeners’ expectations, whose speaking is full of errors, and who flaunt those errors. If you make excuses for such people, you send the wrong message to those who have the responsibility of enforcing the right and wrong of language, such as teachers. And if you routinely prize what’s authentic over what’s excellent (as political supporters of Bush seem to have done), you risk suggesting that some people can’t rise to the standards set out for them. If we jettison those standards, we risk throwing out a good part of who we are—or at least whom we strive to be.