{"id":7971,"date":"2007-09-06T13:18:04","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T18:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ethicalesq\/2007\/09\/06\/um-i-confess\/"},"modified":"2011-08-05T14:53:43","modified_gmt":"2011-08-05T18:53:43","slug":"um-i-confess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ethicalesq\/2007\/09\/06\/um-i-confess\/","title":{"rendered":"um, i confess"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" Um<\/em> the Book<\/a> ..<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

W<\/em><\/strong>ith summer gone, it’s about time to take down that virtual hammock and try to put my, um, chronic procrastinating behind me. The first task is to create and stick to<\/em> a Summer<\/span> Fall To-Read List and Schedule. A realistic<\/em> list, this time.<\/p>\n

\n

to-read list \"napHammock\"
\nand summer corn
\ngrowing, growing<\/p>\n

…………………. by David Giacalone, Legal Studies Forum<\/a><\/em> XXIX:1 (2005) Reprinted: Law in Popular Culture Collection<\/a>, Univ. of Texas, Tarlton Law Library<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Without a doubt, Michael Erard<\/a>‘s new book “Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean<\/a><\/em><\/strong>” (Pantheon, August 21, 2007) is at the top of my nonfiction To Read List. (I just reserved it at our public library, and hope it will arrive right after I finish “Taxi!<\/a>: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver<\/em>,” by Graham Russell Gao Hodges.) National Public Radio featured Um<\/em> last week in a book review segment, “Breaking Down the, Uh, Blunders of Speech<\/a>” (All Things Considered<\/em>, Sept. 1, 2007), and I knew that it was a Need-to-Read for me. You see, uh, some of my closest blood relatives do an awful lot of umming (my twin “yums” conistently) and I’ve always feared that the little annoying habit is deeply imbedded in my character, through nature and nurture.<\/p>\n

Finding a cure — or, perhaps only an explanation — has been a secret hope of mine. Doing so through a book that Prof. Geoff Nunberg, University of California at Berkeley, calls a “page-turner” and “a fascinating meditation on why blunders happen, and what they tell us about language and ourselves,\u201d is too much to resist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the book, journalist Erard categorizes blunders, investigates why we make them and serves up a generous amount of slips, malapropisms and even Bushisms. In his volume of “applied blunderology”, Erard “found that there are two main categories of blunders: slips of the tongue and speech disfluencies<\/em>.’ A slip happens when a person loses control over their speaking, and disfluencies \u2013 which happen in every language \u2013 are interruption and pause fillers like ‘uh’ and ‘um’ that we think should constitute smoothly flowing talk.”<\/p>\n