The Way We Communicate

Finished February 18
Um...Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard
This engaging book discusses the variety of verbal errors we make and the various studies that have been done about the reasons behind them. They include not only those place-fillers like uh and um, but also sentence stutters such as "I said, I said that we weren't..." and sentence correction such as "We went, some of us went to the game." It talks about the famous (the Reverend Spooner as well as George W) and the real versus the legend. Studies range from the psychological to the pedagogical and Erard shows how theories have changed over time. This is an interesting overview of a lesser-known area of language.