-- Um... is the first book ever written for a general audience about speech errors (including malapropisms, Spoonerisms, Freudian slips, eggcorns, Bushisms) and speech disfluencies (filled pauses like "uh" and "um," silent pauses, repairs, sentence restarts, repeated words). It's lively and engaging, designed to keep a reader's attention, and it communicates linguistic ideas accurately and in depth.

-- When used in undergraduate courses, it generates lively discussions among students about language and the brain, the history of language, norms for speaking, and language discrimination. The book is also a good platform for fieldwork, media observation, critical writing exercises, and other assignments.

-- It contains some history of the field of linguistics, which students don't usually receive.

-- I interviewed dozens of linguists and psycholinguists and delved into the research literature in order to explain how often these phenomena occur, why they occur, and why they're scientifically interesting -- not just funny "stumbles" or discrediting "verbal crutches" that we should avoid. Among your colleagues who appear in its pages: Vicki Fromkin, Merrill Garrett, Arnold Zwicky, Jeri Jaeger, Rulon Wells, Herb Clark, Jean E. Fox Tree, Ann Cutler, Heather Bortfeld, Gary Dell, Bernard Baars, and many others.

-- "An enjoyable tour of linguistic mishaps...Rewarding... It reveals the dynamic nature of the human mind." The Wall Street Journal said that "Erard's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. He gets you wondering about blundering." -The New York Times Book Review

To order a desk copy, contact Claire Kelley at ckelley@randomhouse.com or go to http://www.randomhouse.com/academic/examcopy.

If you decide to use Um... in a course, I can be available for web-based visits with your class. For more about the book, including all the reviews, go to http://www.umthebook.com.