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

by Erard, Michael.

  I had to omit mention of two relevant academic fields. Speech pathology, founded in the 1930s in the United States, is the focus of work on abnormal disfluency, such as stuttering, aphasias, and other language disorders. A classic work on stuttering is Marcel Wingate’s 2002 Foundations of Stuttering; if this had been a longer work that treated pathological language I would have mentioned the seminal and controversial work of Wendell Johnson. The other field, conversational analysis, began in the 1960s in sociology and is responsible for close analyses of the structure of human conversation. The founding work is in Lectures on Conversation, by Harvey Sacks (1992). Some of the observations about the function of pause fillers and repairs in conversation come from this field.

  Many thorough, readable books link democracy, eloquence, American social history, and attitudes about language. The classic history of American eloquence, with a focus on individual speakers, is The History of Public Speaking in America (1965), by Robert Oliver. Another stylish, detailed history is The People’s Voice (1979), by Barnet Baskerville. Gavin Jones’s Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999) is a more linguistically and literarily informed study of language in the nineteenth century; an earlier work along the same lines is Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), by Kenneth Cmiel. Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s Eloquence in an Electronic Age (1988) is the standard work on the impact of mass media on politics.

  So much that Kermit Schafer did stands on its own. His 1979 book, Blooper Tube, presents biographical information, and other works are still fun to read or listen to. Erving Goffman’s essay “Radio Talk,” which contains his discussion of “knows better” and “doesn’t know better” errors, draws on Schafer’s blooper collections. In turn, my book owes Goffman’s essay a significant intellectual debt.

  Many other insights and answers came from the following academic experts: M.S. Anwar, Jennifer Arnold, Jeffrey Aronson, Bernard Baars, John Baugh, Ned Block, Heather Bortfeld, Deborah Burke, Ron Butters, Brian Butterworth, Wallace Chafe, Nicholas Christenfeld, Eve Clark, Herbert Clark, Kenneth Cmiel, Nikolinka Collier, Daniel Collins, Carl W. Conrad, Fred Conrad, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Susie Curtiss, Anne Cutler, Kathleen Doty, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Judith Duchan, Patrick Ehlen, Robert Eklund, Jerry Fodor, Paul Foulkes, Barbara Fox, Jean E. Fox Tree, Merrill Garrett, Craig Gibson, Phillip Glenn, Peter Green, Marc Hauser, Santosh Helekar, Robert Helmreich, Bernhard Hurch, Nina Hyams, Jeri Jaeger, Sheri Wells Jensen, Andreas Jucker, Carla Hudson Kam, Saul Kassin, John Kasson, Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, Susan Kemper, Don Kroodsma, Peter Ladefoged, Robert Leonard, Mark Liberman, Heidi Lyn, Don MacKay, George Mahl, Samuel McCormick, Matthias Mehl, Ronald Merrell, Matthew McGlone, Martin Medhurst, Daniel O’Connell, Ynez V. O’Neill, Peter Patrick, James Pennebaker, Bruno Repp, Michael Schober, Carson Schutze, Bennett Schwartz, Jeffrey Searl, Elizabeth Shriberg, Roger Shuy, Felicia Jean Steele, Joseph Stemberger, Anne Graffam Walker, Jeffrey Walker, Walter Weintraub, Michael Weiss, Walter Wilczynski, Kristine Williams, J. Scott Yaruss, Michael D. Young, and Arnold Zwicky.

  Appendix B: A Field Guide to Verbal Blunders

  Anticipation: A type of slip of the tongue in which a consonant, vowel, consonant cluster, syllable, or a part of a word occur earlier than it should, as in “it’s a meal mystery” instead of “it’s a real mystery” (Fromkin).

  Aphasia: A blanket term for various language problems stemming from disease or brain trauma; usually involves numerous paragrammatisms and forgotten words. In the terms of this book, aphasia does not count as a source of verbal blundering, which is a behavior of normal speakers.

  Blend: When two words (or phrases) are chosen from memory but are fused into one (Levelt). There are two kinds of blends: one where the two words are semantically related (“stougher” as a product of “stiffer” and “tougher”), the other where some other idea or distraction in the speaker’s environment intrudes.

  Blooper: A slip of the tongue, usually made in a performance, especially in the broadcast media but also onstage. Also called a “fluff.”

  Boner: A type of “doesn’t know better” error that serves as “evidence of some failing in the intellectual grasp and achievement within official or otherwise cultivated circles” (Goffman).

  Classical malapropism: Unlike the malapropism, the classical malapropism is spoken voluntarily though it is unintentionally wrong. Example: “Are you correlating those papers?” (Zwicky). Arnold Zwicky conjectures that these occur when a speaker tries to select a word from the mental lexicon but gets another one—and doesn’t realize that the actual utterance isn’t the target utterance. Because the speaker remembers only the actual utterance, it is the one he or she says.

  Disfluency: An interruption in speech that can include filled pause/pause fillers, repairs, silent pauses, repeated words, prolonged vowels/syllables, and blocks. Are most often not perceived by listeners.

  “Doesn’t know better” error: Deviations in behavior from the norm because the individual doesn’t know the norm. Includes boners and gaffes (Goffman).

  Eggcorn: A type of classical malapropism. Unlike other word-related errors, the eggcorn often expresses the intended meaning in a more colorful way, even though it is not the correct word or phrase. For example, the term “eggcorn” is an eggcorn of “acorn,” which makes a certain sort of sense, given that an acorn is a seed, as is an egg, and that the shape of an acorn resembles that of a kernel of corn.

  Filled pause: a sound or word that fills a pause that would otherwise be silent. (In this book, I have substituted “pause filler” for this term.) Most common filled pauses are “uh” and “um,” and they exist as such in a number of the world’s languages (though each language has a unique configuration of vowels that makes the most neutral vowel—that is, the one that is easiest to pronounce—slightly different). Filled pauses tend to occur next to each other; they serve to start conversational turns; they can focus the listener’s attention on an important subsequent item in the sentence; and they occur more frequently before lexical words than function words. Because they operate below the level of consciousness, they are unobtrusive and may facilitate interaction between speakers and listeners—and do not, as is most commonly thought, impede communication.

  Freudian slip: According to the OED, first used in 1959 to refer to a slip of the tongue, usually with sexual or hostile connotations. In Freud’s original usage it was any verbal lapse that represented the self’s failure to successfully repress an unconscious intention or desire.

  Gaffe: A “breach in conduct” that is “unintended or unknowing” (Goffman). Example: for some people, wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

  Heterophemy: “Action of the brain which takes place without the volition of the individual” that leads to an error that “consists of thinking one thing and speaking or writing another…. The speaker or writer has perfect knowledge, thinks clearly, remembers exactly, and yet utters precisely what he does not mean” (Richard Grant White). The word, coined by White (hetero = other; phemy = speaking), never caught on but was an early attempt to characterize what is also known as a slip of the tongue/pen, lapse, Freudian slip, or parapraxis.

  “Knows better” error: A momentary loss of control in a performance that an individual otherwise knows; these include both slips and disfluencies (Goffman).

  Malaphor: two idiomatic expressions blended together, as in “that was a breath of relief.” Coined by Lawrence Harrison in 1976. Also called an “idiom blend” or a “syntactic blend.” Other examples (from Hofstadter and Moser): “You hit the nail right on the nose,” “she really stuck her neck out on a limb,” “we’ll burn that bridge when we come to them.”

  Malapropism: An inadvertent substitution of one word for another, sometimes because they sound alike, also because they are related in meaning. According to Fay and Cutler, 54 percent of the malapropisms they studied were semantic substitutions, while 46 percent were sound-based ones. Named after the c
haracter Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s play The Rivals.

  Marrowskying: A mid-nineteenth-century British term for a language game involving deliberate transpositions of sounds, syllables, or words. Also called “hospital Greek” or “medical Greek.” May have been named after a Polish midget, Joseph Boruwlaski.

  Metaphasis: Greek term for the switching of two sounds between two words.

  Mondegreen: A misheard song lyric or line of poetry. Coined in 1954 by Sylvia Wright to describe her childhood mishearing of the line of poetry “and laid him on the green” as “and Lady Mondegreen.”

  Parapraxis: The usual English translation of the German word Fehlleistung, literally “faulty performance,” that Freud used; introduced to English by early Freud translator James Strachey; see also “Freudian slip.” Parapraxes/Fehlleistungen also include forgotten names, forgetting childhood memories, and slips of the pen along with slips of the tongue.

  Perseveration: A type of slip of the tongue in which a consonant, vowel, consonant cluster, syllable, or a part of a word persists after it has occurred. Example: “black bloxes” (example from Fromkin).

  Paragrammatism: “Grammatically incorrect sentences” (Butterworth and Howard); “confused and erroneous syntax and morphology instead of an absence of grammatical structure, omission of grammatical particles and ‘telegraphic’ style in speech” (Butterworth and Howard).

  Repair: The interruption in speech that a speaker initiates in order to correct a perceived error, modify the message’s informational content, or be socially appropriate (Levelt). Example: “Tell me, uh what—d’you need hot sauce?” (Emanuel Schegloff).

  Repetition: A repeated sound, syllable, word, or phrase, often (but not always) associated with a repair. A high frequency of word-initial repetitions of sounds or clusters of consonants is often a diagnostic sign of chronic stuttering.

  Self-repair: When speakers backtrack to correct or avoid a speech error, alter an unintended meaning, or alter the presentation of information. Called a “self-repair” because the speaker has no external feedback indicating that something needs to be fixed, such as a listener’s question (Postma et al.)

  Slip of the ear: Inadvertent misperceptions. When “a listener reports hearing, as clearly and distinctly as any correctly perceived stretch of speech, something that does not correspond to the speaker’s actual utterance” (Bond). See “Mondegreen.”

  Slip of the hand: A slip made by speakers of sign languages.

  Slip of the tongue (also speech error or speech slip): “An involuntary deviation in performance from the speaker’s current phonological, grammatical, or lexical intention” (Donald Boomer and John Laver). Jaeger codes fifty types of speech errors; Fromkin’s appendix contains twenty-seven different kinds of errors, all of which are taken from her collection. Some of her categories are subtypes that she has pulled out for their linguistic interest. I use her labels.

  anticipation of initial consonants:

  a leading list” for “a reading list”

  perseveration of initial consonants:

  “she can she it” for “she can see it”

  consonant reversals:

  “I have caked a bake”

  final consonants (perseverations, anticipations, and reversals):

  “cuff of coffee” for “cup of coffee”

  consonant deletion, addition, movement:

  “in order for the stell to form” for “in order for the cell to form”

  consonant clusters:

  “coat thrutting” for “throat cutting”

  division of consonant clusters:

  “sprive for perfection” for “strive for perfection”

  affricates (a type of consonant):

  “chee cane” for “key chain”

  velar nasal (a type of consonant):

  “the rand orker of the subjects” instead of “the rank order of the subjects”

  vowels (reversals, additions, deletions, substitutions):

  “annototed bibliography” instead of “annotated bibliography”

  vowel + r:

  “cords sorted” instead of “cards sorted”

  single phonological features:

  “smell bother” instead of “spell mother”

  within word errors:

  “plotoprasm” for “protoplasm”

  sh-clusters:

  “short shlady” for “short lady”

  stress:

  “he lives in the big WHITE house” instead of “the BIG white house”

  word reversals:

  “threw the window through the clock”

  haplologies and other telescopic errors:

  “I have a spart for him” instead of “I have a spot in my heart for him”

  derivation affixes:

  “groupment” for “grouping,” “oftenly” for “often”

  independence of grammatical morphemes and morphophonemic rules:

  “a hole full of floors” instead of “a floor full of holes”

  a/an:

  “don’t take this as an erection on my part” instead of “don’t take this as a rejection on my part”

  blends:

  hangling (a blend of “dangling” and “hanging”)

  word substitution (see malapropism):

  “the native vowels” instead of “the native values”

  pronoun, preposition, article:

  “bring sketches with him when you go” instead of “bring sketches with you when you go”

  multiword errors:

  “I have to smoke my coffee with a cigarette”

  ungrammatical utterances:

  “You’re in a more better position”

  negation:

  “I disregard this as precise” instead of “I regard this as imprecise”

  miscellaneous:

  “bood and rorm” for “room and board” “hurt the team on” for “turn the heat on” “She’ll be here on March firth.”

  Spoonerism: Colloquially refers to any exchange of sounds between words to produce new words. Example: “heft lemisphere” “jawfully loined.” Sticklers reserve the term “Spoonerism” specifically for exchanges that result in actual words, as in “with this wing I thee red.” The phenomenon was named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner, an Oxford professor; the OED dates its first use to 1885. The spoonerism can also involve a reversal of words, as in “Seymour sliced the knife with the salami” (examples from Fromkin).

  Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The experience of being unable to remember a word, though one is certain one is close to saying it. Technically called a problem with “lexical retrieval”—that is, getting words. Because words are stored in the brain as matrices of meaning and sound, people who are experiencing the tip of the tongue phenomenon are often able to reconstruct parts of the desired word, such as its first sound or related meanings (Schwartz).

  Uh/um: The most common type of pause filler and the most frequent disfluency in speech; also called an “editing expression.” Universal in many of the world’s languages (though may be phonetic variants of the same sound) because it represents the most neutral (i.e., takes the least effort to pronounce) vowel.

  Sources:

  Bond, Zinny. 1999. Slips of the Ear: Errors in the Perception of Casual Conversation. San Diego: Academic Press.

  Butterworth, Brian, and David Howard. 1987. “Paragrammatisms.” Cognition 26: 1–37.

  Goffmann, Erving. 1981. “Radio Talk.” In Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  Fay, David, and Anne Cutler. 1997. “Malapropisms and the Structure of the Mental Lexicon.” Linguistic Inquiry: 505–20.

  Hofstadter, Douglas, and David Moser. 2002. “To Err Is Human; To Study Error-Making Is Cognitive Science.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28(2): 185–215.

  Fromkin, Victoria, ed. 1973. Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence. Mouton: The Hague.

  Kellmer, Göran. 2003. “Hesitation, in Defense of Er and Erm.” Engl
ish Studies 2: 170–93.

  Levelt, Willem. 1989. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Boston: MIT Press.

  Postma, Albert, Herman Kolk, and Dirk-Jan Povel. 1990. “On the Relation Among Speech Errors, Disfluencies, and Self-Repairs.” Language and Speech 33(1): 19–29.

  Schwartz, Bennett. 2002. Tip-of-the-Tongue States: Phenomenology, Mechanism, and Lexical Retrieval. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

  Zwicky, Arnold. 1982. “Classical Malapropisms and the Creation of a Mental Lexicon.” In Exceptional Language and Linguistics. Ed. Loraine K. Obler and Lise Menn. New York: Academic Press.

  Appendix C: Slips Versus Disfluencies

  Some people might point out that slips of the tongue and speech disfluencies have separate and distinct causes. Isn’t it confusing to put them into the same category as “verbal blunders”? It’s true that the two are different: slips result from a mental plan gone awry, while disfluencies represent a delay or interruption in planning itself. However, I grouped them together because they share a number of properties: both present undesired if inevitable instances of failing to “get things in order in time,” and they both can damage social performances. Both are subject to the same vicissitudes of human perception, and both have been objects of fascination by different people in different periods. Perhaps most important, both slips and disfluencies appear to be superficial manifestations of disorder which, on closer inspection, both reflect an underlying order and regularity that is worth trying to understand.