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Um … : Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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 Released this year in paperback, Michael Erard’s Um … : Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean will lend itself as a guidebook to the verbal intricacies of candidate’s speeches that will play out this 2008 election season.
Aside from its relevance with current events, Um … serves as a textbook for any language guru who wants to explore why people make blunders when they talk.
Erard explores speech, both casual and public, from the various branches of science that have studied it. There is little to any evidence of speech errors in ancient times and almost all recordings of blunders have been recorded since the early nineteenth century. Erard points out this doesn’t mean ancient people could talk better than those of us in modern times, there’s just no record of their mistakes.
Then, psychologists, including the famous Sigmund Freud, began analyzing and recording them and supplying, in their opinion, why people made mistakes when they talked. In Freud’s case, he based his scientific opinion on his theory of psychoanalysis.
A contemporary of Freud was Rudolph Meringer and he disagreed with Freud. In Meringer’s opinion he thought slips of the tongue where simply slips. There was no hidden meaning in the slip. He found a commonality in the types of errors he documented: swapping sounds, swapping words, etc. Meringer’s work provided the beginning of terminology that was added to by other scientists in the years since.
Language gurus will also be interested to learn of an organization founded in 1924 dedicated to help people become better speakers: Toastmasters. Their rates of success are impressive and Erard details their effects.
Um … is indicative or Erard’s obvious interest in the stumbling blocks of every speaker, from the President of the United States to a stranger on the street. His organization can trip up his readers at times, particularly in the beginning but he’s articulate (no pun intended) and manages his subject with an expertise he garnered from years of study, not unlike his predecessors in the field.
You may find this book will open your eyes even more to the slip-ups and fillers peppering the conversations you hear and participate in and what your common speech errors are. The author encourages you to have fun with this and use it for your own improvement and instead of telling others what they’re doing wrong, just give them this book and let them learn on their own.
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