This is one of myriad arresting tidbits cast out in Erard's "Um... : Slips, Stumbles, And Verbal Blunders, And What They Mean," in which the author slips, stumbles and blunders through a meandering and superficial but generally engaging examination of what goes wrong and why in the long journey from thought to vocalization.
First, there's the history of our perception of errors in speech. There wasn't much notice, or at least, much written comment at all until the mid-19th century, Erard says, when advice books on how to eliminate "ums" and "uhs" began to appear. Sigmund Freud, of course, came up with the most widely recognized tag for slip-ups, conferring amateur shrink-dom on us all.
Electronic media and recording devices hadn't been around for too long before entrepreneurs began collecting "bloopers" (announcer Harry von Zell's "Hoobert Heever" was one of the earliest and probably the best known) and packaging them for a suddenly intrigued public.
Before long, linguists began to take a real interest. Errors in speech, they reasoned, might be keys to understanding how it is produced. When slipping up, speakers never replace a noun with a verb, for example, or vice-versa, and errors indicate just how far in advance people "plan" what they're going to say.
Across languages, speakers make the same basic mistakes - but every language has its own "place holders." In English it's "um" and "uh," the former for longer pauses and the latter for short ones (which seems obvious the instant you think about it, which I bet you never have), but if you want to sound like a native in another language, fluency and a good accent aren't enough: Learn their place holders, or you'll always be pegged as a non-native speaker.
Throughout "Um ..." you have to machete your way through the padding. A chapter on Toastmasters contains no more than a handful of sentences having to do with errors in speech. What should have been thumbnail profiles of prominent linguists expand into mini-bios. And Erard never quite finds his footing; "Um ..." occupies a rocky, uneven no-geek's-land between hard science reporting and ultralight piffle.
Worth a visit, but not a long one.
- Arthur Salm
