I concur with you about the ubiquity if not stupidity and banality of vocal tics such as “um,” “er,” “well,” and “like”, which has become a severe indictment of the superficiality and degeneracy of contemporary culture.
Regarding much-abused words, Mark Carnall has described some of them as follows:
I was talking with a very brilliant friend and we were sharing our dismay at how it’s very easy in professional work settings, especially after a global pandemic, to dramatically shrink your vocabulary and the minimemetics of something like a workplace means that it’s very easy for words to go from a rare or even ironically used turn of phrase into something we’re all saying all the time without thinking. Her example was the overuse of the word piece, ‘a piece of research’, ‘of a piece’. Piece, piece, piece. Horrible waste bin of a word. My example was the dominance of ‘vibe’ and ‘vibes’ replacing equally annoying and lazy ‘energy’ before it.
My own pet peeve is the W word, as fully detailed and comprehensively analysed in my following post:
The W word is far more rampant and egregiously abused than all the other much-abused words combined! Perhaps I have already broken the world record of citing the greatest number of concrete examples and valid reasons to detest how the W word has been abused.
Wishing both of you a wonderful week and a fantastic August!
Technically speaking or medically speaking, “um,” “er,” “well,” and “like” are not vocal tics. Instead, linguists and speech-language pathologists classify them as filler words, crutch words or speech disfluencies. Although public speaking coaches occasionally call them “verbal tics” or “speaking tics” colloquially, they are fundamentally different from actual neurological vocal tics. The only exception is if/when an individual diagnosed with a tic disorder (such as Tourette Syndrome) develops a complex vocal tic that happens to sound like a word. If someone involuntary shouts or repeats the word “like” abruptly, out of context, and driven by a physical premonitory urge, it may be a vocal tic. However, for the vast majority of people, it is simply a natural speaking habit.
Thank you very much for your comment.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend and a fantastic mid-August!
Sounds good. Your speech is blissfully free of vocal tics such as “um,” “er,” “well,” and “like” (as in “I think Carl Sagan was, like, really cool.”).
Ha ha ha! Thank you very much.
Dear Robert and Tony,
Ahhhh! Grrrrr! That insufferable, vexing L word!
I concur with you about the ubiquity if not stupidity and banality of vocal tics such as “um,” “er,” “well,” and “like”, which has become a severe indictment of the superficiality and degeneracy of contemporary culture.
Regarding much-abused words, Mark Carnall has described some of them as follows:
My own pet peeve is the W word, as fully detailed and comprehensively analysed in my following post:
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/use-with-caution-or-not-at-all/
The W word is far more rampant and egregiously abused than all the other much-abused words combined! Perhaps I have already broken the world record of citing the greatest number of concrete examples and valid reasons to detest how the W word has been abused.
Wishing both of you a wonderful week and a fantastic August!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
Coy “ums” and vocal growl are off putting, but I take issue with the term “vocal tics”.
Dear Debi,
Technically speaking or medically speaking, “um,” “er,” “well,” and “like” are not vocal tics. Instead, linguists and speech-language pathologists classify them as filler words, crutch words or speech disfluencies. Although public speaking coaches occasionally call them “verbal tics” or “speaking tics” colloquially, they are fundamentally different from actual neurological vocal tics. The only exception is if/when an individual diagnosed with a tic disorder (such as Tourette Syndrome) develops a complex vocal tic that happens to sound like a word. If someone involuntary shouts or repeats the word “like” abruptly, out of context, and driven by a physical premonitory urge, it may be a vocal tic. However, for the vast majority of people, it is simply a natural speaking habit.
Thank you very much for your comment.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend and a fantastic mid-August!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
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