Pat Nicholson, of Falmouth, Mass, writes: “Why do so many people use empty words to fill a void while thinking of something to say instead of just pausing until a thought or word arrives? Words such as you know, like, uhm, and so are too often used as fillers, like lettuce on a sandwich.
“I do have some Pavlovian responses to their use such as ‘uhm said backwards is muh’ and ‘s[ew] buttons on your underwear and zippers on your socks.’ With my kids, I’d hold up fingers counting each like in a conversation at dinner. I have had some success in getting others to recognize the use of empty words. However, the speech patterns rarely change. Is such use recognized as acceptable now by the sources you reference?”
Pat, what — you don’t like lettuce on a sandwich?
My go-to sources are like you in either considering filler words beneath their notice or heaping scorn on them (see, for instance, Bryan A. Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage on like “As a Vogue Word and Verbal Tic”). But just now I readily found two authorities on business English who spoke up for filler words, or “vocal disfluencies,” as Allison Shapira, an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a leadership communications coach, calls them in Harvard Business Review.
Filler words are useful, Shapira argues, “to hold the floor” in “an environment where people routinely interrupt you,” and they can also be “an effective tool to break into a conversation (perhaps in the middle of a rambling colleague’s filler words).” In both cases, the filler words stake out the speaker’s turf in what would seem to be relatively combative settings.
In Stanford Business, Valerie M. Fridland, a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Nevada, argues that filler words, which she calls “crutch words, “are really valuable and they have arisen to serve a need.”
Fridland uses the common bugbear like to illustrate this. She points out that “you can use like as an approximator. So it tells you I’m estimating something, I’m giving imprecise information on purpose, and that’s when we use it instead of about. So if I say ‘he’s like 12 years old,’ I could have said ‘he’s about 12 years old.’ It’s a one-to-one shift. [Neither] is more meaningless than the other, but simply younger speakers prefer to do it with like and older speakers prefer about. So it’s really just a generational divide.”
Of course, like when it’s used as an interjection serves other purposes, as this 1993 opinion piece from The New York Times, amusingly explains:
Our elders would have us believe that we — the twenty-something generation, Generation X, the MTV generation — are doomed to fail, not in the least by our supposed grammatical ineptness. Paramount to our problems, they claim, is a tendency to pepper our dialogue with the word “like” as if it were a verbal tic, demonstrating our abysmal vocabularies and utter lack of neurological activity.
Don't believe it. Much more than the random misfire of a stunted mind, “like” is actually a rhetorical device that demonstrates the speaker's heightened sensibility and offers the listener added levels of color, nuance and meaning.
Take the sentence, “I can’t drive you to the mall because, like, my mom took the car to get her hair frosted.” Here, “like” is a crucial phonic punctuation mark that indicates: “Important information ahead!” In our frenetic society, where silence is no longer powerful but completely alien, the dramatic pause doesn't carry much rhetorical clout. We employ “like” to replace that now obsolete device.
The author, Jim Fredericks, goes on to explain three other uses of like that were — and still are — nonstandard among grownups.
What we’re really discussing, I think, is levels of language. And it surprises me that authors writing in two major business publications have come out in favor of filler words (though I don’t suppose an article that just objected to them would be considered worthy to appear in print). Be that as it may, rest assured that standard English does its best to steer clear of filler words.
Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.
Filler words are almost never used in writing. But for most of us it's very hard to speak more than a few sentences without needing a brief pause to organize the next batch of words in our heads, and that's one way where being an "um-succumber" or a "like-liker" is useful. I marvel at the skill of broadcasters who can speak intelligently and at length without a single filler word. (But I do admit that listening to someone who says "like" every few words can be annoying.)
It feels fun and fitting to tap the “like” icon after reading about “like.” 🙂