Let’s start with ‘Uuuhhm’. When watching TV or listening to talk radio, I often hear sentences like this: “I – uuuhm – have come to believe that – uuuhm – mmm – uuuhm – most people – uuuhm – do not – uuuhm – eat the right food.”
Clearly, a person speaking like this does not really know what he or she wants to say. When we speak, we can think ahead to develop a concept in our mind what we want to say next and how we want to say it. But rarely do we have a word-for-word text ready to be spoken, unless we have learned our statements by heart or speak from a teleprompter, which is not possible when we are in an unrehearsed conversation or discussion.
Consequently, we must produce much of what we plan to say next while we are saying what we are saying. In 1805, the German poet Heinrich von Kleist wrote an interesting essay about this phenomenon. Its title was “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (About the gradual development of thoughts while speaking). In order to be able to speak fluently, a speaker must constantly think ahead of his or her own words. People who cannot do this or have not been trained to do this will frequently run out of thoughts to be vocalized when they are speaking. They use fillers like “uuuhm” to cover up this embarrassing fact and to gain time. The (non)use of ‘uuuhm’ separates the good speakers from the bad ones. Bad speakers make a lot of ‘uuuhm’ sounds. Good speakers don’t. That is not to say that even a good speaker who has thought through well what he plans to say may not occasionally lose his/her train of thought. But the good speaker will not make the ‘uuuhm’ sound. Instead, he/she will make a brief pause, reorganize his/her thoughts and then continue speaking in a coherent way.
The modern use of the word ‘like’ has become a symptom of mental and intellectual rot. It has its proper place in language. For example, we can say that flying an airplane is not like driving a car. Or we can say that we like Beethoven’s music. Or we can say that expressions like “a bald man without hair” are pleonasms. However, listening to people speaking these days, in particular younger people, one can hear statements such as this: “I wanted to make like a right turn with my car and when I like did I like hit the tree.” Or: “I like hate hunting.” I noticed this manner of using the word ‘like’ particularly often when listening to students discussing politics with Charlie Kirk. This dysfunctional and meaningless use of ‘like’ seems to be a modern academic mannerism. The word clearly serves no recognizable purpose when used in this way and it carries no identifiable meaning. In other words: it is entirely superfluous and a symptom of weak thinking discipline and low speaking skills.
Next comes ‘you know’ or ‘you know what I mean’. This expression is mostly used to hide the fact that the listener does not know what the speaker means; or worse, that the speaker tries to hide his/her inability to explain what s/he actually means. The speaker insinuates that the listener knows already what the speaker means without having explained what (s)he means; and without verifying that, if the listener does not object, (s)he did indeed understand what the speaker meant. We hear sentences such as: “Never in my entire life I thought I would ever – you know – experience something like this.” Or: “And then, you know, the car would not start.” The use of this expression is often an attempt to co-opt the listener, insinuating that s/he has an intuitive knowledge of what the speaker means, thus maneuvering the listener into silent consent with the speaker’s view or opinion. This expression is not just a sign of the speaker having a brain fart but also often an attempt to manipulate the listener into agreeing with the speaker.
Another term that is used ad vomitum by TV and radio locutors is ‘literally’. The term means ‘exactly as stated, without exaggeration or metaphor’. It comes from the Latin ‘littera’, the ‘letter’. Literally then, it means ‘as written’, or ‘by the letter’. It is a synonym to ‘actually’ and ‘really’. Its correct use would be for example “The suicide bomber literally exploded” or “In the concentration camps, the NAZIs literally worked the prisoners to death” or “At Cannae, the Romans literally fought to the last man.” Here, the expressions ‘exploded’, ‘worked to death’ and ‘to the last man’ are not metaphors. The word ‘literally’ is also often used incorrectly for emphasis or exaggeration as in: “I was literally dying of laughter.” They were not actually dying. This is meant to emphasize that something was very funny. Or: “He literally exploded with anger.” He did not really explode, of course. This is just an exaggeration of the person’s emotional state. Or: “I am literally starving.” The person is not starving. The expression is used to indicate that a person is very hungry or has built up a good appetite.
This misuse of “literally” has become somewhat accepted in casual speech as a form of hyperbole or for emphasis, which is why we encounter it with increasing frequency. In linguistics, this shift is sometimes referred to as “semantic broadening”, where the meaning of a word expands over time. I see it more as a symptom of slackening intellectual discipline, of cloudy thinking, and of a clear lack of rhetorical skill.
Another mental misfire is the word “so”. When I was recently listening to a radio report about a criminal assault, the interviewer asked the victim: “Can you briefly describe how it all happened?” The victim responded: “So – I hear the doorbell ring, and I walk to the door and open it. So – this guy is standing there.” And so on. The word “so” is used as a meaningless opening word, which can be followed by almost anything. There needs to be no causal or consecutive connection. Much like the South American “Bueno entonces” or the German “Ja, also, uhm”. By contrast, when I say “The doorbell rang and so I went to open the door” the “so” means as much as “consequently” or “therefore”. The same in: “I invested in the wrong stocks and so I lost all my money.” But in “So – I hear the doorbell ring” the ‘so’ has no grammatical or semantic function. It is meaningless and superfluous. Linguistic fill dirt – so to speak.
There’s a long-standing debate in linguistics between the prescriptive and descriptive approach. The former argues that speakers of a language must follow its rules. The latter argues the rules of a language change as the ways change in which the language is used by its speakers. In fact, these positions are not contradictory but complementary. Language does indeed develop but it must also follow certain rules if it is to serve as an effective means of communication. Even if language changes, we cannot communicate effectively at any stage of linguistic development if we cannot organize and express our thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively.
Occasional use of filler words can indicate a moment of hesitation where the speaker is trying to organize his/her thoughts. It may not necessarily be a sign of mental weakness but rather a social phenomenon. For many, especially younger speakers, these patterns of speech can signal group identity or social alignment. The use of “like” for example can be part of a group speak or sociolect, marking one’s cultural or generational cohort. Often, though, the overuse of filler words indicates conversational anxiety or it indicates that a person speaks faster than he/she thinks.
In 1641, the French philosopher René Descartes wrote in his book “Meditations on First Philosophy” that human thinking and language must be clear and distinct (“clare et distincte”) in order to be capable of recognizing and communicating truth. Our current ways of communication are unfortunately often neither clear nor distinct. Could this be one of the causes why the words we hear spoken do so often not convey the truth?