Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin

This interesting, readable book focuses on verbal blunders, ranging from slips of the tongue (spoonerisms, Freudian slips) to speech disfluency (e.g. the use of um and other fillers). According to the introduction, it was inspired by the author’s reaction to the speech patterns exhibited by George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign in the USA, whose speech during the campaign exhibited a relatively high proportion of verbal blunders, yet received a positive public response: ‘around half of the American electorate seemed willing to accept [Bush’s] verbal blunders as an authenticity that they found lacking in smoother-tongued politicians’ (12). Erard saw this as ‘a remarkable moment in the public life of language in the United States’ (12) and waited for someone to publish an explanation of this phenomenon. When no such explanation emerged, E decided to write a book on verbal blunders himself.

The book consists of eleven thematic chapters, e.g. ‘The secrets of Reverend Spooner’, which addresses the life and influence of the Reverend William Spooner of Oxford University, who is reported to have committed so many verbal blunders (e.g. he is said to have told a student, ‘You have hissed all my mystery lectures’ instead of ‘You have missed all my history lectures’) that one type of verbal blunder, the spoonerism, is now named for him. Similarly, ‘The life and times of the Freudian slip’ (28–52) discusses Sigmund Freud’s view of verbal blunders, which holds that speech errors result from psychological factors, and its scholarly reception. Freud’s work has given rise to the now popular term ‘Freudian slip’, coined in the 1950s, which was famously defined by the character Cliff Clavin on the 1980s American sitcom Cheers as ‘saying one thing and meaning a mother’. There is also an introductory chapter, three indexes (further readings, a glossary of types of verbal blunders, and a clarification of the distinction between ‘slips of the tongue’ and ‘speech disfluencies’), and an accompanying website (www.umthebook.com).

As noted above, the book is both interesting and readable. At times it overextends itself in striving to be both erudite and charming, but this is not a serious problem. It contains a good deal of interesting material on a wide array of topics and is well worth reading. The volume itself is hardcover and cleanly edited, with only a handful of typographical errors.