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Verbal tics: I, um, I'm thinking here

An author explores the meaning of our speech "disfluencies."

By David Walton, Special to the Times
Published August 26, 2007

Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
By Michael Erard
Pantheon, 288 pages, $24.95

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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 very 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 likes, "repeated words, repeated sounds, or repaired (restarted) sentences," and all the thousand and one interruptions we routinely tune out.

Everyone makes them, on average once every 10 words.

The first thing you learn in this instructive book is that speech lapses are far from meaningless, but follow a regular pattern, like grammar. When we stumble over a noun, we replace it with another noun. Our slips conform to the sounds, syntax and words we intended to say, and therefore are often funny.

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." 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.

Disfluencies occur in every language - consistent 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 is written with unexpected humor, grace and high spirits.

David Walton is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh.

[Last modified August 24, 2007, 12:22:01]