Um, You Might Like This Book

Ah, the verbal blunder. The slip o’ the tongue. The stutter, the stumble, the embarrassing gaffe at the company Christmas party. You’ve been using language practically all your life, so why does your tongue continue to betray you so?

The truth is, for just about every person on the planet, verbal blunders are unavoidable. We like to test ourselves with tongue twisters (why does Sally keep selling those seashells by the seashore? It can’t be a lucrative business), but still, quite often in fact, our words trip us up. Or rather, our brains do. And most of the time, these blunders seem innocent enough – but do they actually mean something?

That’s the question Michael Erard sets out to explore in his new book, Um…Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, $24.95). Inspired during the 2000 presidential campaign by America’s favorite blunderer, George W. Bush, Erard looks at the history of the blunder, of language itself, and considers the extensive research of linguists, psychologists, and even law enforcement officers. In doing so, he hopes to illuminate the significance of what is essentially a very human quality: the everyday error that takes the form of a Spoonerism, a malapropism, a so-called Freudian slip, and other disfluencies. It's blunderology, if you will. (Yeah, it’s a word.)

This book is a fascinating read, although there were some chapters that didn’t hold our attention as well as others. Just like oxygen or water, language is such a fundamental part of our lives that most of us rarely think about it, or what it means to our culture, or even ourselves. In Um…, Erard investigates exactly that, and thanks to his work, we’ll never be able to say “um” again without questioning its true meaning.

Come talk to Michael Erard about your favorite blunders tonight at Barnes & Noble in the Arboretum.
7:30pm
10000 Research Blvd
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 418-8985