If one specialized corner of late-19th-century Viennese history had proceded differently, we might today be saying “Meringer slip” rather than “Freudian slip.” Rudolf Meringer was a professor of philology whose study and theory of slips of the tongue – he collected 8,800 of them – preceded Sigmund Freud’s interest in them and differed from Freud’s radically.
To Freud (whose “slip” did not become a commonplace term until the 1950s), a medical doctor and psychiatrist, verbal blunders conveyed the true desires of the unconscious. Every slip or gaffe, however seemingly innocuous, hid a secret intention, usually sexual.
Meringer, on the other hand, used slips to get a handle on language, not, like Freud, on the self. “He saw,” says Michael Erard in his new book, “Um … Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” “that slips are not random, but are patterned according to the structure of the language.”
Of course, sex trumps philology every time. Freud prevailed and became known as the “father of psychoanalysis” (a subject Meringer scorned as “a caricature of science” and a “concocted faddishness”). Freud’s many works were translated and published far and wide in the subsequent century, whereas Meringer’s seminal 1895 book on “misspeaking and misreading” has never been published in English.
But, as Erard points out, Meringer (“the first blunderologist”) is having the last word as Freud and psychoanalysis come under increasing criticism. Research following Meringer steadily demolishes Freud’s notions on the significance of verbal blunders.
Erard, a journalist and linguistics specialist, calls this, his first book, “a work of applied blunderology,” asking why verbal blunders happen, what they mean, and why they matter.
There are countless types of blunders, but the author divides them into two categories: slips of the tongue (such as “I have caked a bake”), and speech disfluencies: fillers such as “uh” and “um,” repeated words, repeated sounds, or repaired (and restarted) sentences.
The average speaker of English, Erard says, makes as many as seven to 22 slips of the tongue a day, and has two to four moments a day struggling to find the right word or name. About 5 to 8 percent of the words normal speakers say each day involve “uh,” “um,” some other pause filler, repeated sound, restarted sentence or repair.
Meringer and others after him point out that blunders are integral to, not intrusions into, language, in the way a window is integral to a wall. Erard compares them to the actuarial term “normal accidents.”
Because errors occur according to the rules and patterns of a language, an English-speaker’s slip comes out something like “chlodium soride,” not “sochlo rideium.”
No conclusive link has been found between disfluency patterns and personality traits. “Uh,” for example, is not a sign of anxiety.
The prescriptive tastes of society – the desire for what might be called “an aesthetic of umlessness” – diverge from the biological reality of language, Erard says. There is little or no mention of blunders in writings about speaking in the past, even as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.
The ancient Vedic tradition has it that “om” is the primordial sound of the universe, but Erard wonders if it might more likely be “um.” According to a Dutch language expert, “uh” is the only word/sound universal across languages.
The book is entertaining as well as informative. The author has a good time attending a convocation of Toastmasters, who do strive, cheerfully, for “umlessness.”
He chronicles the millions that Kermit Schafer made off radio and television bloopers; President Bush’s oral blunders, which millions of Americans, including some linguists, do not find intolerable; and controversial linguistic autocrat Noam Chomsky, who, in characteristically imperious manner, declares slips to be unworthy of study.
In summary, Erard concludes that disfluency is normal, rules for “good speaking” fly in the face of the biological facts about it, and that trying to communicate without disfluencies may be more distracting than it’s worth. “Verbal blunders do not mean any more, in themselves, than what we attribute to them.”
This book about oral blunders, however, contains a few written ones. “A slip of the tongue is an inadvertent accident,” Erard writes. We might add, an “inadvertent accident” is a redundancy, as is “inadvertent mistake.”
Then there is this: “With its broad boulevards and monumental buildings, Vienna did not seem to be a city where small events like slips of the tongue would be noticed.” Really? Is there a physical environment ideally conducive to observing such things? Calcutta, perhaps?
All in all, though, this is a well-written and fluent book about disfluencies.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
NONFICTION
Um … Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
By Michael Erard
$24.95
