Tuesday, July 15, 2025

A long, excellent, recent discussion of filler words in the book Like, Literally, Dude by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The president of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club, Brian Reublinger, told me about a 2023 book by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland titled Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the good in bad English. Linguistics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. English professors, public speaking coaches, and other pedants will tell us what we should be doing. For example, there is an article on filler words by Joel Schwartzberg in the February 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine on pages 14 and 15 titled Drop Those Crutches. In contrast, linguists tell us what we are doing, why we do it, and where it came from. I got Like, Literally, Dude from my friendly local public library and am enjoying reading it. You can find excerpts from it at Google Books.  

 

Chapter 2 on Pages 65 to 97 is titled Umloved. It has the following section titles:

What the uh?

 The ums of antiquity?

A Freudian um?

Brain farts

Comprendo?

Men-o-pausal patterns

Staging an um-prising?

Umdone

 

On pages 80 and 81 the Comprendo? section says:

 

“Go to any public-speaking class and I can pretty much guarantee that they will not be advising you to ‘um’ more. As a matter of fact, pretty much any public-speaking course worth its salt will give you tips and pointers on how not to be disfluent, rather than give you gold stars for how many ums you can produce during one PowerPoint presentation. But that is why they pay linguists the big bucks and public-speaking coaches get crickets. Um Okay, maybe I have that backward. That’s why they should be paying us the big bucks. Because we linuists have read the psycholinguistic research that suggests we have been wrong to ban hesitation from our talk. Just because we have been conditioned by our speech teacher to avoid using them or lost our lunch money to Toastmasters International, we find little scientific evidence that suggests they actually deserve such a negative reputation. In fact, the most fascinating area of hesitation research is not on why we ‘um’ but on how our ums and uhs might actually be a speaking superpower.

 

How is this possible? Because our ums and uhs, along with other signs of disfluencies lake false starts (sa – say what?) seem to signal to our listeners to be on alert that there is something requiring greater cognitive effort happening. Why would this be useful from a comprehension standpoint? Because it leads us to expect the unexpected; we don’t get sidetracked by anticipating easy words or simple sentences, because we know disfluencies tend to accompany harder linguistic choices. Let’s unpack this a bit by looking at what some of this research can tell us. 

 

Our hesitations seem to act as pretty significant comprehension aids for our listeners. For instance, in one research study, participants were aske to move a mouse to select an object from two choices on a computer screen after hearing a prompt. The trick was that one of the objects had been previously mentioned during the study and the other had not. When the experimental instructions included an um before the name of the object to select, participants were not only more likely to be faster at identifying the unmentioned object, but they also started moving the cursor in that object’s direction before the um was even finished. It seemed the um clued the listener in to which word was more likely to be said (the unmentioned one) because they understood um’s role of marking something unfamiliar. This effect did not occur when the researchers used a same-length background noise instead of the filled pause. The um made them do it."   

 

[When we skip to page 86 we find something I blogged about on February 13, 2014 in a post titled Adding a few uhs and ums improved recall of plot points in stories]:

 

"This advantage for memory and speed has been well studied – experiments testing disfluency effects on comprehension have pretty consistently illustrated recall and processing-time benefits when a filled pause is part of the stimuli. And the benefits are not just on word recall – we also seem to remember stories better when uh or um enter the picture. In an experiment [Ref. 86] testing how well people performed at recalling specific parts of the story Alice in Wonderland, participants showed better recall when they heard recordings with filled pauses occurring before some plot points, such as’ Meanwhile, … uh …, the cook keeps hurling plates and other items at the Duchess.’  Equivalently timed coughing inserted into the passages at the same points, though, didn’t help them out in recalling those plot points later. In fact, the coughs seemed to impair recall. So it is specifically the uh that does the trick.”

 

Chapter 3 on pages 99 to 123 is titled What’s Not to Like? It has sections titled:

 

Like, why?

The trouble with like

Approximately something

Laser pointers

The plot thickens

Old dogs, new tricks

What women like

To like or not to like?

 

It begins as follows [pages 99 to 104]:

 

“Walk into any middle school in America and there’s one word you’ll hear echoing down the hallway that has taken on more than its fair share of shade. No, it doesn’t rhyme with ‘luck’ or ‘hit.’ This one rhymes with ‘hike’ and should be wildly familiar to anyone who’s seen the movies Valley Girl or Clueless. While ‘fer sure’ and ‘totally gnarly’ have faded into the SoCal sunset, the presence of like has only expanded, punctuating every sentence from Los Angeles to New York.

 

The frequent use of like may sound juvenile, but it has taken over our linguistic nooks and crannies in almost every variety of global English. It appears at the beginning of sentences, in the middle of clauses, and now it even introduces quotes. The funny thing is, despite its pervasiveness, hardly anyone claims to like this new type of like. Even those who admit to using it themselves rarely remark on it as a positive attribute. Case in point: When I ask my college students to name the things that bug them the most about language, like is always at the top of the list, comically appearing in the very sentence that denigrates it: ‘I hate how people, like use like all the time.’ Once the offending word is mentioned, the students can’t stop noticing how often it pops up in everyone’s speech for the rest of the class period – and then the rest of the day, week, month, and year. The fact is, like it or not, like use is here to stay. But before condemning it as a sign of impending linguistic ruin, let’s take some time to consider why like might have entered our speech in the first place. As I tell my students, maybe, just maybe, there is more to like than we might at first believe.     

 

Like, why?

 

The expanded use of like is so widespread that news outlets ranging from The Atlantic to Time to Vanity Fair to The New York Times have covered what seems to be its troubling and meteoric rise. One online college advice site has a post headlined ‘How to Stop Saying Like and Immediately Sound Smarter’; a speech-improvement service calls it ‘The Like Epidemic,’; the Chronicle of Higher Education asks that we ‘Diss Like’; and in Vanity Fair Christopher Hitchens called it ‘The other L-word.’ Across global English varieties, concerned parents worry about this troublesome habit. One mother, echoing the apprehensions of many, appeals for help from the advice expert at the UK’s The Guardian, fretting that her teenager’s like use sounds uneducated and will affect her success in the future. Teachers also report that its prevalent use in class is becoming problematic. In fact, a friend of mine, who is a middle school teacher recently told me that it’s her students’ number one verbal tic. This collective hand-wringing leaves little doubt that we have little love for like. So then why do we continue to use it?  

 

Ask most parents and they’ll probably say it has something to do with adolescent laziness or linguistic rebellion. Ask most employers and they’ll probably say it has to do with a shift from a more formal workplace to a casual, less professional setting. Ask most linguists, though, and they’ll probably tell you we’re missing the mark. Like used in such contexts is not much different from other markers that we have used through the centuries to help us organize and structure our speech. In other words, there is nothing that unique or concerning about it.  

 

Though we might not realize it, English has an arsenal of pragmatic-oriented features of speech, such as so, you know, actually, and oh. As with our now beloved ums and uhs, these discourse markers don’t directly contribute to the literal (semantic) content of a sentence. Instead, when added, they contribute to how we understand each other by providing clues to a speaker’s intentions. For instance, when I say. ‘Oh, I finally got a job!’ my use of oh is a shorthand way to prompt a listener to mimic my surprise. Discourse markers provide the social greasing of the conversational wheel. Without them, our speech would sound less conversational and more computer-like. In fact, try having a conversation without using any discourse markers. Not only will you find it quite difficult, but others will find you a less appealing speaker.

 

Discourse markers are by no means new or unusual Shakespeare made liberal use of them, and the epic poem Beowulf even begins with one (Hwoet!). Suggestively, historical texts that date back to the old English and Middle English periods (fifth to eleventh century and twelfth to fifteenth century, respectively) have shown evidence of words functioning similarly to modern discourse markers. For instance, the Old English word pa, meaning ‘then,’ served as a foregrounding discourse marker in narratives and was often associated with colloquial speech. As a matter of fact, some Old English scholars suggest pa occurred so often in some early texts that it can’t have carried much semantic content, a complaint that echoes our modern assessment of excessive like use. Less controversial, Old English hwoet, meaning ‘what,’ seems to have served as an attention-getting device roughly similar to the modern sentence’s initial so. As the opener to Beowulf, it’s a signal to the audience that something worth paying attention to will follow. In more recent times – at least if you consider the early modern period (fifteenth through seventeenth century) recent – interjections such as alas, ah, and fie, among others, similarly functioned to give a sense of a speaker’s intentions or emotions (alas, ‘tis true). Though charming to our ears, these DMs may well have been painful to parents of the early modern era.

 

Looking back, we find that the origins of the word like are similarly rooted in the Middle English and early modern period. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first notes the use of like in its adjectival and verbal functions – as lich (adjective) and lician (verb), respectively – as early as 1200, with noun, conjunction, and prepositional uses noted around 1400 – 1500. The use of like as a conversational marker shows up later, though much earlier than we might have expected. The OED cites a passage from a text written in 1778 (F. Burney’s Evelina II), where it is used to qualify the speaker’s subsequent remark, ‘Father grew quite uneasy, like, for fear of his Lordship’s taking offense.’ It also cites another example employing like in this way in 1840, in a magazine of the era: ‘Why like, it’s gaily nigh like, to four mile like.’ And hinting at the source of like’s vibe of hip vernacularity, the OED gives a more recent example from a beat-influenced magazine, where we locate like occurring in its now familiar spot at the beginning of a sentence – ‘Like how much can you lay on (i.e., give) me?’ (from Neurotica Autumn 45).”

 

 

Monday, July 14, 2025

Please don’t snore when you fall asleep at a meeting


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a Savage Chickens cartoon by Doug Savage (shown above) on July 9, 2025 titled Make It Count. On June 16, 2011 I blogged about how you can Learn to ignore these audience behaviors:

 

“On Tuesday I spoke at the NACE Intermountain Section meeting in Salt Lake City. My topic was an introduction to stainless steels and corrosion. I’d given basically the same presentation at their Sun Valley Symposium in January 2010. Before I began I asked the audience to raise their hands if they had attended the other meeting. About 6 of 30 did, and I told them it was OK to go to sleep, but not to snore.”

 

An article by John Boitnott at Inc. on March 6, 2018 titled What to Do When Your Co-worker Is Snoring suggests how to avoid this worst moment:

 

Be loud

Move

Invest in headphones

Politely wake the person up

Notify a supervisor

 

 

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Do you suffer from the heartbreak of library anxiety?


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I found some articles about university students being anxious when using a library. There is a Wikipedia page on that subject. Such anxiety obviously could interfere with speechwriting and other research.

 

I never had that problem. Perhaps it was because as a child of five I already had been introduced to the children’s room at the main Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. I blogged about it in a post on April 7, 2021 titled This is National Library Week and today is National Bookmobile Day.

 

There is an article by Constance A. Mellon at College & Research Libraries for 1986 (Volume 47, Number 2 pages 160 to 165) titled Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development. When she asked six thousand U. S. students, between 75% and 85% described their initial response to the library in terms of fear or anxiety. A more recent article by Gabriel X. D. Tan et al. in the Journal of Affective Disorders Reports for 2023 titled Prevalence of anxiety in college and university students: An umbrella review found a range from 7.4% to 55% with a median of 32%.

 

Some university libraries have web pages about overcoming anxiety. For example, Jennifer Lau-Bond at Harper College has one titled Library Anxiety Overview. And Erica Nicol at Washington State University has a second titled Library Anxiety – How to Beat It. And St. Catherine University – Library and Archives has a third titled Don’t Panic! Using the Library for Academic Success: Home.

 

Another recent article by Anthony Aycock in Information Today on May 7, 2024 is titled Mental Health Awareness Month: What is Library Anxiety?

 

The cartoon of a stern librarian was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Friday, July 11, 2025

Four inside jokes with punchlines from family stories

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are inside jokes where you must have heard a family story before the punchline will make any sense. On July 9, 2025 I gave a speech titled Four inside jokes from my family stories at the Pioneer Toastmasters club meeting. It was for a Level 1 project in the Engaging Humor path on Writing a Speech with Purpose.

 

The first story is about eight decades old. My mother was the youngest of five sisters. One of her older sisters held a dinner party soon after she had married. She baked a pound cake for dessert using a recipe which she never had tried before. When she cut the second slice from the loaf at the table, one of the guests exclaimed:

 

“Wow, you even filled that cake with custard!”

 

But she hadn’t – it was just cake batter. The middle of the cake still was quite raw. She had to put it back into the oven for another fifteen minutes to finish cooking. Perhaps she had forgotten to preheat the oven first. 

 

My mother told us a story about two of her younger cousins back in the city of Cincinnati. The older one, Gil, was in the fourth grade. That day his school class had been on a field trip to a meat packing plant – which is a polite euphemism for a slaughterhouse. They were eating fried chicken for dinner when Gil inquired:

 

“How was this chicken killed?”  

 

His younger brother Phil was in the second grade.  He never had considered where the food on his plate came from. Phil pushed his plate away and asked in disgust:

 

Is this a DEAD chicken?

 

I don’t know if Phil became a vegetarian right then and for how long. In our family that question is used to describe situations where you’re appalled when you find how things actually work. On April 22, 2020 I blogged about Is this a dead chicken? (Punchline from a family story).  

 

And on March 1, 2013 I blogged about a couple other stories in a post titled Does your speaking voice sound like a little girl? The second involved Bea Kahles, who was tone deaf.  One rainy April day, her half-dozen kids were playing in the basement family room. They were marching around in a circle, pretending that they were riding carved wooden horses on a Merry-Go Round. She was providing the calliope music by scat singing. Finally the youngest daughter could no longer stand it, and she piped up:

“Mommy, please stop singing. You’re making my horse sick!”

The pound cake image came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Find the one unhappy face


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keeping a positive attitude is helpful. There is a Pearls Before Swine comic by Stephan Pastis on June 29, 2025 with the following dialogue:

 

Stephan: There are a lot of people these days who only see the negative in everything. See if you’re one of them by finding the one unhappy face in this sea of happiness.

 

Rat: First thing I saw.

 

Pig: But they’re all smiling.

 

Goat: Too lazy to draw a real strip today?

 

Stephan: You must be one of the negative ones.

 

My cartoon used eighty happy and sad smileys from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Sunday, July 6, 2025

Three excellent articles on pauses – two with singularly misleading titles

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On November 16, 2019 I blogged about Please don’t just tell us about ‘the pause’ – because there are several different types and lengths. There is an excellent article by John Zimmer at LinkedIn Pulse on July 1, 2025 titled Pauses in a speech: Why, When, How. He discusses pauses:

 

before you start

to signal that something important is coming

to let the message sink in

when moving to a new topic

for emphasis

to get your audience to reflect

when answering questions

 

There is a second article by Peter Dhu also at LinkedIn Pulse on June 30, 2025 titled The Value of Silence (The Pause) For Effective Speaking by Peter Dhu. He talks about long pauses before (The Pre-Pause) or after (The Post Pause) you say something, and pausing to create suspense or to grab attention.

 

There is a third article by Dave Hablewiz on February 27, 2024 titled The Power of the Pause: The Secret Sauce of Great Public Speaking. He divides pauses into two categories: incidental and intentional. Then he discusses different types of intentional pauses: Pre-emptive, Punchline, Audience, Thoughtful, Emphatic, and Indefinite. Dave has an embedded 25-minute YouTube video (with a transcript to follow from a Toastmasters District Conference) titled The Power of the Pause D2 Conference 2023.

 

Thursday, July 3, 2025

Quit pissing around and fix your presentation slides


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

There is a brief but excellent article by Michael Leveridge at the Canadian Urologic Association Journal for April 2025 (Volume 19, Number 4, pages 78 and 79) titled This is a busy slide: Fix your presentations this year. He has the following advice:

 

Cognitive Load

 

“Your presentation imparts a ‘load’ on the audience member. All of the information piles into working memory for processing, and only if connections are made will schemata form and encode into long-term memory.

 

The intrinsic load is the complexity or difficulty of the material. It varies between recipients, as those already expert can process complex concepts more easily than novices. There’s not much you can do in the moment to change the complexity or the audience’s knowledge base, but you can think ahead about each.

 

The extrinsic load is everything about the speech and visuals that is not relevant to understanding the material. It is the mental effort required in deciphering redundant text, linking words and visuals, or parsing dense graphics: a marginally relevant image, the static of hearing words being read as you try to read them, irrelevant lines on that table, the back-and-forth to align the figure legend with the curves. These fall under the research-backed principles like coherence, redundancy, and spatial contiguity, and these names suggest the solutions (Ref. 2).

 

Cut the superfluous text and visuals, even if interesting. Signal to the relevant points on the tables and visuals. Bring like elements together on the slide to decrease the work of linking them. Graphic design principles – alignment, repetition and proximity – are the tools of facilitating understanding by removing clutter. Again, a sweep to declutter and intentionally arrange your slide deck is a quick and powerful thing.”

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.