Michael Erard, in his new book "Um ... : Slips, Stumbles, Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean," calls the study of verbal blunders blunderology. Is this his word, or has this word been around? I don't find it in any dictionary, and there are only 213 cites for it on Google, many citing Erard. Interestingly, Erard says that when Freud was saying that a wrong word reveals what you're actually thinking about, at the same time, Ruldolf Meringer, a linguist and contemporary of Freud's, said these "slips" were mostly mix-ups and not pyschological revelations. Today's scientists mostly agree with Erard, though there are still those who believe in Freud. I wonder why people listened to Freud and not Meringer.

Erard says that people make more than 1,000 verbal blunders per person per day. Doesn't that seem high to you? These blunders include slips of the tongue and "speech disfluencies," such as "uh," "um," and "ah."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

I suppose he thinks that if you got a tour group of people prone to speaking errors on a single vehicle, you'd have a Blunderbus?

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Doesn't that seem high to you? These blunders include slips of the tongue and "speech disfluencies," such as "uh," "um," and "ah."

Not if it includes verbal fillers such as those you have cited - plus "I means", "you knows" and "in point of facts" - and their many cousins. Listen to any non practised speaker giving a TV interview and just count them.

I think a more common term is speech disfluencies. There are discourse markers, e.g., I mean, you know, which are like vocalized punctuation and mark where one utterance leaves off and another begins. And, then, there are fillers, e.g., um, er, which fill in gaps and pauses (hesitations) in speech. Other kinds of disfluencies include repetitions and restarts. And, then there are linguistic hedges, too, which seem to me to be related.

As to the why—warning, academese alert!—here's a dissertation called Preliminaries to a Theory of Speech Disfluencies and a shorter presentation called Statistical Language Modeling for Speech Disfluencies. (Googling "speech disfluencies" gets one over 14K ghits.)

One fun assignment, which I enjoyed immensely, for a phonology class at university, was to transcribe some actual conversations and story-tellings. It was fascinating. (I, personally, have always, um, liked the term lapsus linguæ.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Love your academese alert comment!

Bierma says of Erard's book: "His term 'verbal blunders' covers both 'slips of the tongue,' when we flub a word that we know, and 'speech disfluencies, when 'uh' and 'um' invade our sentences and stop them in their tracks." Yet, when I read that Wikipedia link, his use of "speech disfluencies" really should be "fillers," correct? Is Erard just wrong, or are there other accepted definitions for "speech disfluencies?"

Is Erard just wrong, or are there other accepted definitions for "speech disfluencies?"

Hard to say. I guess that he could just be ignorant of previous studies on the subject. At university, I was taught, to review what others had said on the subject, and then proceed from there. But, perhaps, that's just not everybody's porcelain vessel of herbally-infused water.

Your way sounds correct, Z.

As an aside, your comment of "At university,..." sounds very British to me. I'd either say, "At the University of Wisconsin" or "At the university."

The British was is more concise, AND its meaning is clear, so I like it!

Asa, in hospital - for the terminally odd

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As an aside, your comment of "At university,..." sounds very British to me. I'd either say, "At the University of Wisconsin" or "At the university."

Would you say, "At school" or "At the school"?

"At school" or "At the school"

We'd usually say: "When I was in college ..." Maybe, "at college". It depends on the context.

Don't you speak of school?

I think that Richard is speaking of actual school - the place you send your kids before they get older.

Here the two phrases "at school" and "at the school" have distinctly separate shades of meaning. Is that the case there too.

Similarly "at college" and "at the college" would mean slightly different things here too as would "at University/at the University".

When I say the kids are at school, it can only mean that the children are at those educational institutions which include grades 1 through 12 (i.e., primary, middle, and secondary schools). Others from the States may differ with my usage. At the school sounds wrong to me, unless it is qualified, e.g., the kids are at the school for gifted children, or some such.

For me, if kids are in class, they are "at school." But the chorus might have a recital tonight at the school. The same would be true of "college." My kids are in college taking classes, but their classes are held at the College of Nursing. "University," though? I wouldn't say "in university" or "at university" ever, I don't think. I'd not say it the way z said it above. Perhaps that is just me, though.

I wouldn't change the construction just because the venue had changed.

At nursery school
At primary school
At secondary school
At college
At university

and finally (one would hope) at work!

I would use an article only if I meant that the person was actually physically in that place, as opposed to being somewhere else.

I think we've mentioned the differing uses with hospital before.

For example, "I was in hospital for an operation", but "I was in the hospital to visit a sick friend".

I'm with Kalleh on this one. I haven't heard "in university" or "in hospital" other than in British English.

Interesting about those articles. I was writing a paper for publication with a colleague, and she was editing my first draft. It seems that I was missing "the's" all over the place, at least in her opinion. I wondered if I'd be tainted a bit by my other colleague who is from China. I am always adding "the's" to her writing!

Speaking of being "tainted," I am forever changing my spelling of words like "humour" or "behaviour," obviously from this board. I suspect I'd quickly develop an English accent were I to move to England in the same way I've developed British spelling!

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Speaking of being "tainted," I am forever changing my spelling of words like "humour" or "behaviour," obviously from this board. I suspect I'd quickly develop an English accent were I to move to England in the same way I've developed British spelling!

Does anyone know when the American spellings became officially "American", and not just a variation on the "correct" British spelling? I was a child in the 1950's, and my reading consisted primarily of Oz books. Most of them were written in the first quarter of the 20th c. It was quite a while before I became aware that I was spelling 'grey', 'colour', 'humour', etc. differently from most kids. Also: I learned geographical pronunciations which are now considered British, like Ca-RIB-be-an (though I now say Car-ib-BE-an like everyone else). Is this a regional thing? Perhaps we in the Northeast were slow to join the rest of the country.

I think it was Noah Webster who initiated the change from colour to color etc. He introduced quite a few spelling simplications. Some caught on; many did not.

They must've been British printings, because I've never noticed any British spellings. Noah Webster is the person who set most of the rules of American orthography in place in his An American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828. Webster also wrote some popular and influential spellers and grammars.

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Also: I learned geographical pronunciations which are now considered British, like Ca-RIB-be-an (though I now say Car-ib-BE-an like everyone else).

The British way is Car-ib-BE-an.

Car-a-BE-an is also the Ohio and the Pennsylvania way, in my experience.

My nephew was "at University" in New Zealand. It sounded quaint to me--and British. In the U.S., I think most people say "my nephew is in college" even when he attends a university. But of course, we mean a smaller institution of higher learning when we say "college," one granting a degree equal to that granted by a university, and the British mean prep school--private secondary school--do they not?--when they refer to colleges.

I stumbled onto this article in Language Log earlier in the week, which gets into a discussion concerning strong and weak proper names that might have some relevance to this discussion.

Wordmatic

A college is generally part of a university. Perhaps the closest you have in America is possibly campus. Each college was founded by some benefactor in the past. Some go back to the 14th-15th centuries.

To take Cambridge University as an example, there are 31 colleges. Each college is an independent institution with its own property and income. The colleges appoint their own staff and are responsible for selecting students. The teaching of students is shared between the colleges and University departments. Degrees are awarded by the University. This mainly only applies to the older universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, London, etc. More recently-founded universities operate more on the American one-campus model, although some may still contain two or more colleges, often as a result of amalgamation.

Several secondary schools (11-19) style themselves as colleges, although the word is really only used as a simile for "school", and has no special meaning, although it may lend the school some false dignitas.

Ah, I see now. Well, our universities are divided into colleges also. For instance, my alma mater, the University of Cincinnati, has a college of Arts and Sciences, of which I am a graduate; a college of business; a teacher's college; a college of engineering; a college of design, architecture and art; a college of nursing; a medical school, etc. The colleges are not independent of the university. They are components of it. The University grants the degrees by college, so my diploma says the University of Cincinnati College of Arts and Sciences.

I was thinking more about the difference between "at college" and "in college." Here, saying someone is "at college" is used more in the sense of "away at school," while "in college" is used in the sense of the person being at that level of the education process.

Wordmatic

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my alma mater, the University of Cincinnati, has a college of Arts and Sciences, of which I am a graduate; a college of business ...

We would call them faculties. A college generally offers subjects across the board, although some do specialise to a certain extent.

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saying someone is "at college" is used more in the sense of "away at school," while "in college" is used in the sense of the person being at that level of the education process.

We'd probably use the same distinction, although we'd be more likely to use "university" than "college".