It's... Uh... Like... Y'know... Hard to Say

I was reading an interview with Bristol Palin, teenage daughter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and a new mom. I admire her for deciding to raise her child. It's hard enough being a parent under the best of circumstances. How much harder to be a young, as-yet-unwed, mother whose life is being scrutinized and discussed so publicly.

And to make matters worse, there are people like me who blog about her enthusiastic use of the word "like." She like uses the word in like every sentence.

But in her defense, every generation has its favorite meaningless filler word, and to be honest, Bristol, so do I. Filler words are words that we insert into our speech to give our mouths something to do while our brains are trying to figure out what we want to say... a linguistic "Hamburger Helper," if you will.

• When I was in elementary and high school, we said "uh" and "um" a lot. We had a really tough teacher who would say the word "um" every time we did in a verbal report. Talk about embarassing!


• Then "y'know" became fashionable. I'm still guilty of using this one a lot.


• Bristol's generation seems to love "like."


• "Valley Girl" speak was pretty much all filler. It's like... y'know... Ohmygosh!

Just so you don't think I'm just pointing the finger at others, I've been told that I've been stammering a lot lately. This is true. Things have been moving at a pretty hectic pace at work, and no doubt I've picked up this affectation as a way to give my brain a few more nanoseconds to process something meaningful.

I googled filler words and found a good little article by Joseph Dewey at Amazon.com. In addition to the above filler words, he lists some "advanced filler words," such as "just," "very," and "really," which aren't as annoying to the ear as filler words, but which can often be removed from speech without changing the meaning one bit. Dewey also offers some tips on eliminating filler words from your speech.

Some very good... y'know... food for thought!