I’m a relatively fluent speaker—or at least so I’ve convinced myself—and don’t indulge in filler words when I get stuck. For better or worse, I don’t usually get stuck, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on whether or not my brain was engaged at the time.
But I digress.
Today’s post draws on a wonderfully pithy little piece by Val Swisher, the CEO of Content Rules. In her post, Ms. Swisher takes no less than a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University to task for claiming that filler words like “totally,” and “like,” are advancing the language. Mr. McWhorter, the professor in question, claims that these words show “an awareness of the states of mind of others…”
Huh? Or in Ms. Swisher’s words, “Um, what?”
Like Ms. Swisher, I, like, totally do not believe that some of our current lexicon is, like, advancing the cause of language. (And I say that at the risk of accusations of pedantry and prissiness.) Here’s what Ms. Swisher has to say, and I’m like totally behind her. “Our language does not advance because people toss in words that break up their thoughts and our listening. Our language advances when people can locate the words they need to say, speak them, and listen to the response.”
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