It’s said we use them every nine seconds of speech in an average day. I think I use them pretty much all the time in this blog. George Bush had a famous line “”Fool me once, shame on – uh, shame on you. Fool me twice- … you can’t get fooled again”, which uses them. They’re, like, speech disfluencies and stuff…

20% of our talking lives are spent uttering such useless words according to this news bulletin I was just watching on the TV. They went around asking people to think who said famous historical quotes and counted the disfluencies they used, which worked out to be about 1 in 5 words.

There’s been studies in to why we use them. Fact is we don’t like silence. A study in the 1950s showed that half of what we speak is, in fact, nothing. It was also figured out that anyone giving a speech would figure out their next line using either an Umm or an Urr to fill in the gap. A more modern study showed that alcohol intake actually reduces the amount of disfluencies used. Pfft, such a giveaway.

The word ‘like’ came from America in the 1980s, which I use all too much nowadays. Next time you hear me, just listen out for them. I do it too much. But anyway, the French go ‘euh’, the Germans ‘mmm’, the Japanese ‘eto’ and the Spanish ‘este’. But they all have the same function – serving as a “ARGH WHAT DO I SAY NOW?” silence filler.

I know I’m not the only one to do this, but I do say “Urm…” and “Urr…” a lot when I’m nervous, like when I did my English presentation back in Year 9. Anybody would’ve thought they were my topic. Meh. Anyway…

We’ve got Senior Prefect Elections coming up soon, and for their pitches, I’ll see how many times they say them, just for a laugh. Obviously, I’ll support them all the way, but I’ll be laughing at their horrible filler words.

So yeah. Filler words are, like, all the rage now. I had to get rid of all the unintentional disfluencies in this to stop it being so ironic. But hey, a few can’t urr… hurt, can they?

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Tags: blog, Eric, News, Sam, show