Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
Written on May 20, 2008
Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard (Pantheon, 2007).
This book takes a detailed look at verbal blunders of all sorts, as well as attitudes towards them and approaches to cataloging and studying them. The author finds that “…verbal blundering is integral to language, not something that intrudes upon it.” (p. 55)
Pause fillers like “uh” and “um,” restarted sentences, and repeated words are the most common speech disturbances, but they were rarely noticed or commented on until voice recording technologies put everyday speech under heightened scrutiny. Slips of the tongue are the rarest kind of error but perhaps for that reason the most noticeable.
Among the topics treated in the book are “the aesthetic of umlessness” (p. 113), Toastmasters, bloopers, and the verbal blunders of President George W. Bush.
The book includes a section of recommended reading and a “field guide” to blunder terms. The website www.umthebook.com has the full bibliography and endnotes, plus a rich array of supplementary material.
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I used this book in my upper level language course. My students really enjoyed the text and it generated some heated debate between the prescriptivists and descriptivists in the classroom. The ideas presented in the text changed how many of the students looked at their own speech and the speech of others.