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

by Erard, Michael.

  I had fewer qualms about putting slips and disfluencies in the same category than giving them the label of “blunders,” a word with a distinct negative flavor. But I could not find another term that was light-hearted, easy to understand, and widely applicable. If anything, “blunder” successfully reflects how deviating from the ideals that we wish to follow is still embarrassing and anxiety provoking, even if we know full well why the deviations happen.

  My goal has been to tell the natural and social history of verbal blunders as provocatively as possible, which required jettisoning discussions that are interesting but whose inclusion would slow down the narrative. One such discussion is about how our models of spoken communication, as well as much of the way we study spoken language, is based on assumptions that come from written language. This is part of a larger, ongoing academic debate about the relationship between spoken and written language and how societies change when they move from an oral culture to a literate and now digital one. Two particularly good books are A Story as Sharp as a Knife (1999), by Robert Bringhurst, and Spoken and Written Discourse (1999), by Khosrow Jahandarie.

  Acknowledgments

  No one knows who the first verbal blunderer was. But many people know a surprisingly large amount about verbal blunders, and I am deeply indebted to those folks for engaging my curiosity. A huge thanks goes to those who shared how verbal blunders touch their working lives: David Broder, Barbara Browning, Lauren Eiler, Isabel Framer, Jerry Giorgio, Lee Glickstein, Barry Grant, Cate Hagman, Doreen Hamilton, Anthony Lewis, Carrie Mitchell, Wiebke Rückert, Katharine Q. Seelye, Alice Tate, Cathy Williams, and David Zulawski. I am especially beholden to the dozens of academic experts who replied to my e-mails and phone calls and answered my questions. I am also grateful to world-champion public speakers Ed Tate, Jim Key, Darren LaCroix, and Randy Harvey; David Brooks was a superb guide to the culture of Toastmasters. For insights into the life of Kermit Schafer and blooper humor, I’m indebted to Bob Booker, Meredith Conover, Peter Funt, Barry Hansen, Raymond Kives, Al Schwartz, and especially Laurie Hannan Anton. For talking candidly about growing up with linguists, I thank Anna van Valin and Elizabeth Zwicky. I am also grateful to the subscribers of the Conlang listserv, the Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List, and the Linguist List. Thanks also to Gerald Fabris, the curator of the Edison National Historic Site, composer David Hahn, and Robert Eklund, for sending materials that would have been impossible for me to get otherwise. The UCLA Center for Oral History Research graciously permitted me to quote from their interview with Victoria Fromkin, and the Federal News Service allowed me to interview their transcribers, visit their office, and quote from their “duh” files. Donovan Deschner relinquished umthebook.com. Sadly, George Mahl passed away in 2006, but I’d like to thank him for speaking to me about the early days of his research, and for the signed copy of his book. I thank his daughter, Barbara Mahl, for reaching out.

  Thanks to all my friends and family who provided critical infusions of encouragement; without you, yes you, this book would not have been written. Heather Bortfeld, Stephanie Bush, Jennifer Chenoweth, Herb Clark, Stephen Krashen, Jean Fox Tree, Robert Jackall, Jeri Jaeger, Leslie Kronz, Deborah Shoonian, and Arnold Zwicky were all kind enough to read and critique versions of the manuscript. For clearing out the blunders that haunted my text, I will always appreciate Roger Gathman’s profoundly insightful editorial advice and translation work and Mimi Bardagjy’s invaluable fact-checking. The responsibility for any remaining errors belongs to me, not to my repressed unconscious desires.

  I’m very grateful for the wise counsel of my agents, Dan Green and Simon Green. Simon deserves credit for the title, Um…, which he suggested very early on but whose brilliance revealed itself more slowly to me than to everyone else. Every first-time book writer, if he or she is lucky, should have an editor like Alice van Straalen, who was patient and firm in shaping this book into something fun, smart, and cool. I also thank Dan Frank, Fran Bigman, and all the people at Pantheon who helped make my publishing experience so pleasurable.

  All my love and admiration go to my wife, Misty, who has noticed a verbal blunder or two with me (both mine and hers) and who, among her many gifts of love, doesn’t mind when I say “um.”

  About the Author

  Michael Erard, a graduate of Williams College, received an MA in linguistics and a PhD in English from the University of Texas. His writing about language has appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Wired, and Slate. He lives in Austin, Texas.

  *1Thus, “I—we think it’s important” would become “We think it’s important,” but “I think, I think—we think it’s important” would stand.

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  *2In a classic 1968 article on slips of the tongue, Donald Boomer and John Laver defined a slip as “an involuntary deviation in performance from the speaker’s current phonological, grammatical, or lexical intention”—that is, the sounds, syntax, and words a person intended to say. For a complete taxonomy of slips of the tongue and the other verbal blunders, see Appendix B.

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  †3Though if you’re Bill O’Reilly, who mistakenly called a “loofah” a “falafel” in an infamous monologue of his captured on tape, you may feel no mortification whatsoever.

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  *4From the Greek word metaphasis, literally “the transposition of sounds.”

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  *5“An Irish Bull may very well be defined as any remark which appears rotund and meaningful enough, until our apprehension actually arrives upon it, when there is simply nothing there,” as Max Eastman put it. Example: “May you never live to see your wife a widow.”

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  *6She may have meant George Bernard Shaw.

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  *7Word stress can also determine whether or not slips occur. Manjari Ohala, a linguist at San José State University, has claimed that Hindi speakers (of which she’s one) do not make exchange slips because, she speculates, Hindi words don’t have a syllable with stronger stress. She’s asked linguists in India to listen for slips, but they’ve reported nothing. This makes Hindi a language that lacks verbal blunders, at least of some types.

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  *8Among adult native speakers, slips of sounds are more frequent than slips of words. According to Kay Bock, 40 percent of exchange errors involve sounds; slightly more than 35 percent involve words.

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  *9Robbins noted that the first transposition isn’t a “true” spoonerism, though the second one is. Robbins hews to a strict definition of the “true” spoonerism, which requires “(1) transposition of individual letters (generally initial) between words, or transposition of complete syllables or words. (2) The consequent formation by such metathesis of legitimate words, including slang, but not including jabberwocky. (3) The achievement of a humorous effect by the unexpected incongruity.”

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  †10The actual first stanza of Tennyson’s poem is:

  Come into the garden, Maud,

  For the black bat, night, has flown…

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  *11Boruwlaski was famous for sitting on the laps of royal women and falling in love with their ladies-in-waiting. That, and the fact that he was twenty-eight inches tall.

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  *12Timpanaro argues the young man opts for the more typical word order in Latin, preposition-adjective-noun (ex nostris ossibus), which differs from the adjective-preposition-noun order of the quote (nostris ex ossibus). Also intruding is German word order, which would also put the preposition first.

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  *13Someone might say that the two words have different vowels. However, in my wife’s dialect of English, they do—she and other speakers of Southern English pronounce the “i” sound of “pin” the same way as the “e” sound of “pen.”

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  *14I re
fer to these instead as “pause fillers.”

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  †15Such as the “dh” in the sentence that Mahl transcribed, “If I see a girl now I’d like to take out I just…dh…ask her.”

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  *16More recent accounting has come up with similar numbers. In 2004, Robert Eklund estimated that about 6 percent of all words counted as disfluent. That is, they contained filled pauses, silent pauses, prolongations of individual sounds, some explicit editing terms, truncations, mispronunciations, and repairs, but not counting silent pauses or slips of the tongue.

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  **17Verbal blundering in English is well studied for the simple fact that most of the early researchers spoke English.

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  *18If you actually pronounce “er,” you’re saying it incorrectly—there’s no pause filler with an “r” sound. People who do say it have been influenced by the British spelling of the word, in which the final “r” is silent.

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  *19About the term “tip of the tongue”: Psychologist Bennett Schwartz found that speakers of forty-five out of fifty-one languages have an idiomatic expression that refers to the tongue to name this experience, such as Korean (“sparkling at the end of my tongue”). In Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi, Hausa, and Ibo, the idiom is some version of “in the mouth.”

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  *20Precise figures for this are hard to come by, and the variability is immense. About 66 percent of Americans speak 7,500 to 22,500 words a day, while 40 percent speak 12,000 to 18,000 words a day.

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  *21These categories were laid out by two anthropologists, William O’Barr and John Conley, who turned 150 hours of recorded court testimony into a script that’s played by actors in front of mock juries, made of university students. The performances were then evaluated by the juries.

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  *22Some of Giorgio’s exploits were chronicled in Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives, by sociologist Robert Jackall, published in 2005 by Harvard University Press.

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  *23The incident was mentioned by Richard Grant White, a popular American writer, in an 1875 article about slips, which he called “heterophemies.”“A mental phenomenon so remarkable as the utterance by an intelligent being of just that which he does not mean to say, is surely worthy of careful inquiry as to its cause,” he wrote.

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  *24There is also the degree of incorrectness: in writing, judgments about the serial comma (“apples, oranges, and plums” versus “apples, oranges and plums”) will vary according to the stylistic domain, while the sentence “we gives up tobacco” will be judged grammatically incorrect whether one follows the Chicago Manual of Style, the Modern Language Association style guide, or the Associated Press style guide.

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  *25In a study by Sharon Oviatt, two people talking on the telephone used the most disfluencies (8.83 per one hundred words), while a single person in a conversation with a computer used the fewest (1.74 per one hundred words), not just because the interlocutor was a machine but because the conversation was more restricted. She found that 60 to 70 percent of disfluencies could be eliminated if the human speaker’s questions and responses were shorter and more structured.

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  *26Norbert Wiener, whose life is discussed in a recent biography, Dark Hero of the Information Age, pioneered this method.

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  *27Swedish researcher Robert Eklund has observed that about half of ten-word utterances are fluent, but fluent twenty-word utterances are very rare.

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  *28This can be confirmed by a quick visit to the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, which archives transcripts of various spoken performances. When I visited, “uh” turned up 1,317 times and “um” 1,308 times in humanities and arts lectures, but only 423 and 331 times (respectively) in biology lectures and 292 and 65 times in engineering and physical science lectures. The number of lectures in each field was about the same. The corpus is online at http://micase.umdl.umich.edu/m/micase/.

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  *29In 1931, the linguist Edward Sapir, who was also interested in the link between language style and personality, warned against inferring that a man with a “strained or raucous voice” is “coarse-grained,” because he might come from a place where people shout a lot.

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  *30Goldman-Eisler noted the fluid imagery at play in the notion of fluency: “Many words relating to speech derive from descriptions of water in motion, such as ‘gush, spout, stream, torrent of speech, floodgates of speech,’ etc.” She added that “the facts, however, show these images to be illusory.”

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  *31From a Just a Minute transcript from February 16, 1970, chosen at random:

  NICHOLAS PARSONS: The blarney stone is a piece of rock in a castle in a village outside Cork in Southern Ireland. It is considered that if you manage to kiss this particular er blarney stone…

  [Buzz]

  CLEMENT FREUD: Derek…

  DEREK NIMMO: Hesitation.

  NICHOLAS PARSONS: Unfair!

  DEREK NIMMO: With great pleasure, hesitation!

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  *32Christopher Johnstone, who studies the history of ancient rhetoric, also notes that the venues for speeches in Athens were sizable enough to require speakers to train to speak loudly and to use other ways (such as pausing) to take advantage of these spaces’ acoustic designs.

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  *33The Old Testament book of Judges tells how the Gileadites tried to identify their enemies among hordes fleeing a battle. Anyone who wanted to escape had to say “shibboleth” (meaning “flood water”). The test was designed to expose foes from the land of Ephraim, who couldn’t pronounce the “sh” in the word. Those who could say only “sibboleth” were killed, and the Bible says forty-two thousand Ephraimites died that day.

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  *34This story is clearly modeled on the story of Demosthenes, considered by some to be the greatest ancient Greek orator. Some say Demosthenes had a speech impediment that he cured by filling his mouth with pebbles and shouting to the waves; Plutarch describes the young Demosthenes as having a “weakness in his voice” and a “shortness of breath” that fragmented his sentences and “much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke.” His story of verbal rags to riches has been a model for the biography of orators ever since.

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  *35Digital recording available at the Edison National Historic Site Web site.

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  *36Gerald Fabris, Curator of Sound Recordings at the Edision National Historic Site, also speculated that “Mr. Blaine” might have seen the Republican politician, James G. Blaine, who had traveled in Europe in 1887 and 1888 and was living in New York during late 1888. There is no evidence that Edison ever met James Blaine.

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  *37Some sound artists have produced pieces editing out words and leaving only disfluencies, laughter, throat clearing, and other vocal marginalia. The Books, an electronic folk group, have a fifty-five-second piece called “ps,” and the Seattle-based composer, David Hahn, turned a recorded interview between a journalist and a CEO into a piece called “Corporate Coitus.” Hahn used the “ums” and “uhs” as “compositional building blocks” to create a piece with the crescendos of sexual intercourse.

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  *38As for “like,” Fox Tree would recommend you don’t say it, though she argues that “like” has a different function than “uh” and “um” (they are not used interchangeably in stories that a person has told once, then been asked to repeat). Fox Tree has found that speakers use “like” for a meaningful purpose, which is to qualify or “soften” the information that follows.

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  *39A wide
-ranging account of conceptions of time during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their impact on art, literature, and diplomacy is The Culture of Time and Space, 1888–1918, by Stephen Kern. Kern argues that World War I was precipitated by a failure of rulers’ and diplomats’ decision making to account for and keep pace with diplomatic telegram messages.

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  *40Smedley’s college course work included trigonometry, rhetoric, Greek, German, chemistry, American literature, essay, geology, biology, calculus, psychology, French, logic, history, sociology, and philosophy. He also studied for a semester for a master’s degree in Greek.

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  †41Eventually the two men headed in different directions, Smedley toward establishing nonprofit clubs around the world, Carnegie toward building a for-profit consulting company.

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  *42Smedley also held this opinion. As a senior in college, he wrote, “Education is to prepare man not only for usefulness in this life, but for blessedness in the life to come.”

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  *43The list of basic speeches has since changed slightly.

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  *44As of 1976, it was the seventeenth-highest cumulatively selling record in the world, selling 250,000 fewer than The Monkees and 750,000 more than a John F. Kennedy memorial album.

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  †45Pope’s original line reads, “To err is human/to forgive, divine.”

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  *46“What do the Republicans think the White House is, a box of corn flakes?” came the sarcastic question from Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate.

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  *47Which he did.

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  *48The opposite of competence in this sense isn’t incompetence; it’s performance. Thus, knowledge of a language, as Chomsky refers to it, isn’t what you learn in school but what you already have in your brain—therefore, linguists say you know it.