Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

“An enjoyable tour of linguistic mishaps… . Rewarding… . It reveals the dynamic nature of the human mind.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Engaging… . By focusing on what many of us overlook (or underhear?), Erard has further revealed the complexity and beauty of language. Perhaps he will make all of us both better listeners and, um, better speakers.” –The Seattle Times

“A fascinating look at those two-letter words we all know and, uh, overuse.” –GQ

“Erard’s enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. He gets you wondering about blundering.” –The Wall Street Journal

“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 throughout are hilarious highlight reels 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 isn’t a polyglot. He considers himself a monolingual with benefits. A native American English speaker, he’s lived in South America and Asia, where he learned to speak Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, but please don’t ask him to say anything in those languages. He has graduate degrees in linguistics and rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s written about language, linguists, and linguistics for”Science, Seed, Wired, The Atlantic, The New York”“Times, ““New Scientist”, and many other publications, and is a contributing writer for “The Texas Observer” and “Design Observ

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