Um… is about how you really speak, and why it’s normal for your casual, everyday speech to be filled with verbal blunders — about one in every ten words. Why do they happen? Why can’t we control them? What can you tell about the people who make them? In this charming, engaging account of language in the wild, linguist and writer Michael Erard also explains why our attention to some verbal blunders rises and falls. Why was the spoonerism named after Reverend Spooner, not some other absent-minded person? Where did the Freudian slip come from? Why do we prize "umlessness" in speaking? And how do we explain the American presidents who are famous for their verbal blundering? You’ll have new ways to listen to yourself and others once you’ve met the people who work with verbal blunders every day — journalists, transcribers, interpreters, police officers, linguists, psychologists, among others — and when you’ve learned what verbal blunders tell about who we are and what we want. A rich investigation of a fascinating subject, full of entertaining examples, Um. . . is essential reading for talkers and listeners of all stripes. Praise for Um . . . “Some people are bird watchers and learn a great deal about the birds they watch. Michael Erard watches word botchers and, in the process, enriches our experience of what language is about and what makes us human. After reading Um… , you'll never hear the thud and blunder of everyday speech in the same way.” –Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English “Who'd have thought that a book called Um could be a page-turner? But Michael Erard's investigtions of "applied blunderology" come to something more than the familiar catalogues of verbal slips and gaffes from the high and the low. It's also a fascinating meditation on why blunders happen, and what they tell us about language and ourselves. At its deepest level,   Um is an exercise in the zen of attention, which tunes us in to the revealing noises and pauses that we spend most of our time tuning out.” –Geoffrey Nunberg, NPR commentator “A lascinating fook at yet another revealing instance of human imperfection.” – Kirkus (Starred Review) “Included troughout are hilarious highlight reeks of bloopers, boners, spoonerisms, malapropisms, and 'eggcorns'... His work challenges the reader to think about his or her own speech in an entirely new way." – Publishers Weekly Michael Erard , a graduate of Williams College, received an M.A. in linguistics and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas. His articles about language have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , The New York Times, Wired, Technology Review , and many other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas. Chapter 1: The Secrets of Reverend Spooner If the world of verbal blunders were the night sky, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner of Oxford University could play the role of the North Star. Spooner, who was born in 1844, was famous for verbal blundering so incorrigible that his exploits have been immortalized in poems and songs and, most enduringly, by lending his name to a type of slip of the tongue he was unusually prone to make. In the spoonerism, sounds from two words are exchanged or reversed, resulting in a phrase that is inappropriate for the setting. For Spooner, these embarrassments ranged from wild to mild. Toasting Queen Victoria at dinner, Spooner said, “Give three cheers for our queer old dean,” and he greeted a group of farmers as “noble tons of soil.” There was the time he cautioned young missionaries against having “a half-warmed fish in their hearts.” He described Cambridge in the winter as “a bloody meek place.” Once Spooner berated a student for “fighting a liar in the quadrangle.” “You have hissed all my mystery lectures,” he reportedly said. “In fact, you have tasted two whole worms and you must leave Oxford this afternoon by the next town drain.” A spoonerism can also involve the reversal of two words, as in “Courage to blow the bears of life,” or, when saying good-bye to someone, “Must you stay, can’t you go?” Undergraduates at Oxford University were playfully fond of Spooner, whom they nicknamed “the Spoo.” They also coined the term “spoonerism” around 1885, after Spooner had been a fellow at New College for almost twenty years. By 1892, his reputation for absentmindedness was well known; students came to New College expecting to hear a spoonerism. “Well, I’ve been up here for four years, and never heard the Spoo make a spoonerism before, and now he makes a damned rotten one at the last minute,” wrote one student. (Spooner had assured students that experience would teach them that “the weight of rages will press harder and harder upon the employer.”) Spooner himself knew of his public image. Privately he referred to his “transpositions of thought.” At the end of a speech he once gave to a group of alumni, he said, “And now I suppose I’d better sit down, or I might be saying—er—one of those things.” The scientist Jul