You too commit disfluency. It's a newish technical term in phonology used when analyzing speech. Disfluency names a spoken ploy most of us use every day. Disfluency is inserting short spacer or filler sounds into a sentence when you can’t immediately come up with the next word. For example, He is the…uh….um….head of the group. His proper corporate title is…you know …darn…use it very day … mmmm…. oh…yes!...Vice-President in Charge of Public Excuses for Our Continuing Poisoning of the Planet Earth So That Our Executives May Purchase That Third Summer Home on Tahiti.
Saying um or uh is disfluent. Your fluency in uttering an unimpeded English sentence is very temporarily compromised. For once, I approve of the definition given in a Wikipedia article: “Speech disfluencies are any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables that occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech.” Under that definition, would Homer Simpson’s moronic “Duuhhh” qualify as a non-lexical vocable?
My favourite quotation about disfluency is a pun: “to uh is human but unforgivable!” The punster, whose name is unknown to me, is playing with the famous line by English poet and satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744 CE) “To err is human, to forgive, divine” from Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism.” Popey himself was recalling the famous Latin tag errare humanum est, ‘it is only human to make a mistake’ first enunciated using slightly different phrasing in The Sermons of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 BCE) (in Sermones 164, 14).
A disfluency or filler can be used as a pause for thought. But more often disfluency is the vocal clue that tells the listener no mental activity worthy of the name thought has ever occurred north of this particular jabbering mouth.
For the first several centuries of studying human sounds, this wee morsel of phonology lay neglected and forgotten in the cabinet of vocal curiosities. But recent advances in neurolinguistic brain-mapping have shown disfluency’s importance as a marker in cerebrovascular accidents (strokes) and as evidence in elderly patients of memory decline and other verbal symptoms of senility.
Disfluency as Euphemism
Disfluency is used by some doctors and lay persons as a coy cover-up to mean ‘stuttering.’ It is always a bad idea to coat a clear word like stutter with the gummy veneer of periphrastic weasel terms designed to rob words of their factual meaning by hiding behind creepy substitutions that soften the hurtful meaning.
When any part of language devolves into suckababy goo-goo talk, all language and meaning are in danger. People who stutter, stutter. They don’t undergo “disfluence;” they are not articulation-challenged, they are not “subdued by unwanted laryngospasmic hesitancies.” Bull! Stutterers and (in Britain ) stammerers gulp and swallow their tongues when trying to say “Get Gilbert a grape.” So let’s obtain help for them from speech pathologists and science, not becloud the name of their symptoms in a glutinous fog of pseudo-clinical euphemism.
Here is another cogent reason to not use the term disfluency as a synonym for stuttering. All speakers are disfluent at times, especially under brief time spans when they are nervous, stressed, tired out or pissed to the gills. Sometimes too the words they seek to enunciate are too tricky or complex for them. However, stutterers pause more often and display interruptions and hesitations of quite different kinds than non-stutterers do. Medical terminology has enough clarity problems without tossing into its churning waters terms which arrive compromised with dual or triple meanings from fields outside medicine.
But Note: There IS a Medical Term for Stuttering
In the English language, for about one hundred years, there was a now obsolete medical term for stuttering, the modern Latin balbuties, along with its learned adjective balbutiant ‘stuttering’ and its rare verb balbutiate. But, as a witty phonologist friend of mine said, “It’s too hard to say.”
Although the Latin word balbuties died a lonely death in English from non-use, the root is still alive in modern French, where balbutier means ‘to stutter’ and is the second most common verb used for that meaning, the most used French verb being bégayer. The ancient Roman adjective was balbus formed, apparently long before Rome in Proto-Indo-European, in onomatopoeic imitation of someone stumbling over a word containing several b-sounds.
Speech hesitation and therapy for stuttering were the subject of a 2010 British film about King George VI. “The King’s Speech” starred Colin Firth as the King and Helena Bonham Carter as his Queen.
Etymology of dis + fluency
Dis is a common Latin-derived prefix which several related senses, but used here in a strictly privative sense that negates the meaning of the noun or verb to which it is attached, as in nouns like discontent and discontinuance, and in verbs like displease, dissuade, disconnect and disown.
Fluency is from Latin fluentia, one of a large number of Latin abstract nouns of process or action, formed on the present-participial stem of a Latin verb, in this case, the verb fluere ‘to flow,’ so the evolution of the word looks like this: Latin fluere ‘to flow’ > Latin fluentem an accusative singular form of the present participle ‘flowing’ to show the word-forming full stem > Old French fluencie, fluency > Modern French fluence > English fluency.
Oddly, the Latin verb fluere ‘to flow’ is NOT related to the Germanic root in our English verb to flow (Germ. root *flô), but to flow, of course, is the usual translation into English of the Latin verb. Another common English word from the Germanic root is flood.
Fluere is a Latin reflex of a Proto-Indo-European root *ple which gives Greek πλώειν ploein ‘to swim, to float’ and πλωτός plotos ‘floating, navigable.’ Or the PIE root may be *plou/pleu/plu ‘get wet, be in water’ giving words like Sanskrit plu ‘to swim,’ Greek πλεῖν plein ‘to sail,’ Greek πλύνειν plunein ‘to wash,’ Latin pluit it rains, and Modern French la pluie ‘the rain.’
On that pluvial droplet of knowledge, we shall—ever so briefly—discontinue drawing refreshment from the wellspring of words.
copyright © 2012 William Gordon Casselman
Any comments, emendations, additional word lore or requests for Latin mottoes?
wordguy@shaw.ca
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Reviews of my New Book
Click bookcover for preview
Jenni French of San Fancisco, California writes on her blog "My Corner of the Universe" for March 19, 2011:
Casselman, Bill. Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik: A World Lover's Guide to the Weirdest, Wackiest, and Wonkiest Lexical Gems. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2010.
"I admit it: I'm a word nerd. I love words: weird words, long words, obscure words, funny words. This book is right up my alley. With chapters like "Nautical Words," "Creepy Words," and "Edible Words," I have enjoyed every page of this book.
And the author has quite a way with words, so I have found myself rereading many sentences in this book and slowing my progress through it.
My current favorite sentence is found in a discussion of dog hybrid breed names: "What a revolting concatenation of cutesiness and smarmy nomenclatorial treacle parading under the name of canine hybrid breed names" (19).
I'm sure I'll have another favorite sentence in a day or two.
This book is just that good and just that entertaining."
Author Bill Casselman replies: "Thanks, Jenni!"
Just a reminder that this book contains my ALL-NEW word esssays, none of which are available anywhere else in print or online.
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Cindy Lapeña on her blog "Creativity Unlimited" of July 19 ,2011, writes:
Posted by mimrlith in 365 Things to Look Forward to.
Tags: 365 things to look forward to, books, reading
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19. Starting a book
To a certified bibliophile like me, a.k.a. bookworm, one of the most exciting things to look forward to is to start reading a new book. In fact, sometimes the prospect of starting to read a new book is so exciting that I have to hurry to finish the book I am currently reading, just so I can start a new one.
If there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a book, especially if it promises to be a good one. Of course there are certain books I just won’t touch or be seen with, but at the risk of being hung by my thumbs by fans of such literature, I will not mention any genres in particular. . .
Seeing a book with a title that totally captivates me, like Where a Dobdob meets a Dikdik (yes, that is a book title!) has me so worked up, I just can’t wait to dive in. I imagine all sorts of deliciously fancifully outrageous words with a title like that. Is it obvious? I just love books on words. You won’t believe how many dictionaries I own. Or books on lexical oddities and other lexical explorations. Yes, I am a logophile of sorts. I love the new words I pick up from new books. I relish finding out the meanings of all manner of words and phrases and expressions. What could be more fun?"
(Replies author Bill Casselman: Please scroll to bottom of page or click here to link to a free seven-page preview of my new book, Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik.
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Sample My Newest Book. Click Below.
Jan. 3, 2011
“Mr Casselman,
I wanted to write to thank you for your thoroughly enjoyable [new] book. By background, I am a technologist practicing the somewhat arcane crafts of Information Security.”
David Gamey, Canada
Testimonial Email
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Dear Mr. Casselman,
A search for the origins of an improbable-looking word, paraprosdokian, led me to the first piece of your prose I have had the pleasure of reading, "The Bogus Word Paraprosdokian & Lazy Con Artists of Academe." I have just placed an order for Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik, Canadian Words & Sayings, and As The Canoe Tips, and will add more of your titles as I finish these.
I have just retired from a 40-plus year career in book publishing, the last thirty years spent as director/editor of a number of university presses, attempting to sort the genuine writers from the "Lazy Con Artists of Academe." Sad to say, the latter have so over-bred the former that I could no longer see the rare gem in the avalanches of offal that daily swamped my office and desk. I visited your website and spent far too long there; it was a pleasure to meet a real writer through his work.
. . . I revisited the paraprosdokian page, and have finally quit laughing again at “Casselman's Conclusion.” You were not unkind to the "profligate prof-lets." During my years as an acquisitions editor, in rejection letters I often quoted Prof. Moses Hadas, classicist at Columbia University, who wrote a young scholar in response to having been sent the prof-let's first book, "Thank you for sending me your book. I will waste no time reading it."
I know I will enjoy your books. Keep up the good work.
Thank you,
Luther Wilson
Director (Retired)
University of New Mexico Press, among others
Click to read my paraprosdokian column.
Nov. 15, 2010: On Twitter, Doug O'Neill, a happy buyer of my new Dobdob book, writes, "Even funnier flipping through it a second time around."
Thanks, Doug!
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