"Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean," by Michael Erard. Pantheon, 288 pages, $24.95.
Most books about public speaking focus on how to speak fluently, and treat speech dysfunctions, or "disfluencies" -- all those ums and ers and slips of the tongue -- as meaningless distractions that the trained speaker can eliminate.
Michael Erard's fascinating and enlightening "Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean" takes the opposite approach. Erard, who lives in Austin and trained in linguistics at the University of Texas, focuses on those ums and uhs and ers and likes, "repeated words, repeated sounds or repaired (restarted) sentences," and all the thousand and one meaningless voice interruptions that we routinely tune out of our everyday conversation.
Everyone makes them, even the most practiced speakers. They occur on the average once every 10 words.
The first thing you learn in this instructive book is that speech lapses are far from meaningless and follow a regular pattern, like grammar. When we stumble over a noun, we replace it with another noun, or verb, or whatever. When we mix up sounds, they usually are from the same syllable of the words. Our slips conform to the sounds, syntax and words we intended to say, and therefore are often quite funny.
Erard's book, "a work of applied blunderology," is an entertaining history of attempts by scientists, linguists, and especially Freud, to connect what comes out of the mouth with what goes on in the mind. The "Freudian slip" -- revealing some darker anxiety in the mind -- turns out to be unfounded, however. Slips, although revealing, are not a pathway into the repressions of the mind. Quite the opposite.
Pauses in speech point to thinking, Erard says, "not, as has been previously thought, a lack in thinking, a gap between two thoughts, some psychic anxiety or embarrassment." Pauses are part of a cycle of thinking and speaking.
Disfluencies -- trips of the tongue, "repairs" -- occur in normal preschool children around once every 100 words. In high school seniors, the least disfluent group, it goes down to four. As we age, the number goes up again.
The causes are the discrepancies between the planning and executing functions of the brain -- between planning what we're going to say and saying it.
So it's true: We can't think and talk at the same time.
Men say "uh" and "um" much more often than women do, and also restart more sentences and repeat more words. Married couples blunder as often as strangers.
The most active person in a conversation makes the most blunders.
Disfluencies occur in every language -- consistent, of course, with the grammar of that language -- and even in presidents. Especially in presidents. The fame of our own national tongue tripper, and Erard's fellow Texan, helped inspire this book.
You can feel when an author is enjoying himself, and Erard's survey of these most common of dysfunctions in our dysfunctional society is written with unexpected humor, grace and high spirits.
David Walton, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh in Oakland, is the author of "Ride" and winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for his short-story collection "Evening Out."
