When you read Michael Erard's Um… Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders and What They Mean, you can't help but stumble across the Right Reverend William Spooner, Oxford Don, born 1844, who when toasting Queen Victoria at an official function said, "Give three cheers for our queer old dean," and who berated a student, saying, "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. In fact you have tasted two whole worms and you must leave Oxford this afternoon by the next town drain."
Thank goodness the Right Reverend left behind Spoonerisms which have been entertaining us ever since.
So, as I set out to read and review Michael Erard's, er, ah, a nook of flips, no, a book of slips, that is, slip-ups, somewhere in my brain an April 18th tax inversion rained, a bog fank rolled in, and out came more errors some of which were as entertaining as watching Charlie Chaplin slip on a banana peel.
Mr. Erard calls his book "a work of applied blunderology," by which he means to say that we buman heings, well, our minds are messy-Bessies; that is, according to Erard, "People say an average of 15,000 words each day and make about 1,500 verbal blunders a day." When it comes to plunders, I'm proflipic, prolipkip, er, prolific.
Erard gives us an in-depth look at the work of George Mahl, a Yale psychologist who was "the first social scientist to count adult disfluencies." In the 1950s, while studying fear and anxiety in psychiatric patients, he counted eight types of "speech disturbances:"
1. Filled pauses like "uh" and "um"
2. Restarted sentences, where somebody starts speaking a sentence and then breaks off in the middle and then restarts the sentence, where somebody starts speaking a sentence and then breaks off in the middle.
3. Repeated words, I say, words, ya hear?
4. Stuttering.
5. Omitting a word. That is, omitting a
6. Incomplete sentences that start and suddenly
7. Slips of the tongue, an inadvertent accident like the time the then presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, fatigued from campaigning, said 'wasabi' instead of 'Wahhabi,' the fundamentalist Islamic sect. He'd planned to say "Wahhabi" but when he reached to retrieve Wahhabi from his memory, "wasabi" jumped out in front of his brain. "Such moments," writes Erard, "which are also known as speech errors or slips, appear when the mental machinery that turns ideas into spoken words crashes into itself."
8. Intruding incoherent sounds.
Note: The Oxford English Dictionary first notes "hem," an alternate spelling of "um" in 1526.
By the way, English is not the only language in which people fill pauses in their speech "as naturally as watermelons have seeds." Erard explains that, "In Britain they say 'uh,' but spell it, 'er,' just as they pronounce the 'er' of "butter" ("buttah"). The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh. Serbs and Croats say ovay and the Turks say mmmm. In Dutch you can say, uh and um, in German am and ahm. In Swedish it's eh, ah, aaah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a, and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh, m and hm. According to Willem Levelt, a Dutch speech scientist, "uh is the only word that's universal across languages.
A glance down the book's table of contents reveals how Erard covers his subject and, at the same time, makes it sound like tons of fun:
The Secrets of Reverend Spooner
The Life and Times of the Freudian Slip. (Here he writes of Viennese Professor Rudolf Meringer's famed battles with Sigmund Freud over the cause of Fehlleistung, literally faulty performance, now widely called Freudian slips. By the way, Freud never once experienced the satisfaction of using the term "Freudian slip." Like so many others, he died.)
Some Facts about Verbal Blunders.
What We, uh, Talk about When We Talk About "Uh."
A Brief History of "Um"
Well Spoken. (This provides a History of Toastmaster's International, now a global organization, and how it came to advocate "uh" and "um" avoidance.)
The Birth of Bloopers. (How bloopers got their start on television in the 1950s and then became an entertainment craze through the 1970s.)
Slips in the Limelight. (About Noam Chomsky and how the MIT linguist inadvertently revived interest in slips of the tongue.)
Fun with Slips. (This chapter discusses the "wildly word-misusing character, Mrs. Malaprop, in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 romantic comedy, The Rivals. That's why word slips are now known as "malapropisms.")
President Blunder. (U.S. presidents' verbal blunders down through the centuries.)
The Future of Verbal Blunders
Why does Erard enjoy writing about speech dysfluncies? "I like them because they're signs of the wild, like viruses and sexual attraction, they'll always slip out of our grasp, evading our thickest armor. But such wild things make a lot of people uncomfortable."
Luckily for his readers, Michael Erard's expert writing skills turns speech dysfluencies into extremely entertaining reading matter.
