Politicians' Gaffes: Relevant or Random?

With two months and change to go before the election, you can count on hearing a lot about candidates' verbal gaffes in the weeks to come. The latest comes from Joe Biden, who referred to John McCain as "George" in his convention speech last night, a mistake he dismissed as a "Freudian slip." McCain himself has said "Iraq" when he meant "Iran", among other fumbles. But do such slips of the tongue really mean anything?

For a perspective on this, I went to Michael Erard, whose book Um: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean recently came out in paperback.* From reading it, I know that Biden's mistake is technically known as a "perseveration," meaning he repeated a sound from earlier in the same sentence.

In fact, speech errors like this one "don't really have anything to do with subject mastery," Erard says, just as saying "Osama" when you meant to say "Obama" doesn't mean you think the Democratic candidate is a terrorist.

But, he continues, there's another category of verbal misfires known as "disfluencies" -- speech-fillers like "um" and "you know." Those, he says, can be more telling:

Everyone has a baseline level of disfluency, which has partly to do with individual variations in mental processing speed, partly to do with habit, partly to do with the demands of any given individual interaction. Thus, it's not the presence or absence of disfluency in absolute terms that's meaningful, but the amount one deviates from one's baseline that indicates anxiety, mental load, fatigue, distraction, etc.

So there you go.

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*Mixed Media is mentioned in the afterword, on page 265. And yes, I will give a generous plug to your book if you mention me in it.