Umm, duh...

December 4, 2006 8:53 AM

It drives me effin' crazy when people say "um" while speaking. Yet, curiously enough, other forms of verbal static (e.g. "uhh," "like," etc.) don't bother me in the slightest. What's the deal with that? And is it possible to get past my severe distaste of other peoples' verbal static?
posted by yalestar to human relations (16 comments total)

I don't think anybody can tell you why that particular syllable drives you nuts. I expect you'll get lots of people chiming in with "Yeah, I hate that too," even though that's not an answer to your question. As for getting past it (which I recommend), I imagine if you're sincere about wanting to you should be able to do so. Just remind yourself when you hear someone do it that there are sure to be things about your speech that bother other people; tolerate as ye would be tolerated, and all that.
posted by languagehat at 9:13 AM on December 4, 2006

I would imagine you probably use verbal static but not "um" so you notice it when others do so. Keep in mind that other people hate YOUR verbal static as a start?
posted by agregoli at 9:19 AM on December 4, 2006

My best friend will constantly pepper her monologues, when repeating a conversation verbatim (which she seems to have an annoying knack for) with "He's like." Example:
"He's like I don't like it when you're upset he's like I really hate the fact that I'm the one making you cry he's like I don't know what you want me to do he's like I can try to work harder he's like but I don't know how."
She's got a ton of those "isms" and they make me positively batty. I've only pointed out one to her, which was when she was overusing "You know what I mean?" at the end of every sentence rhetorically. She's stopped doing that one, so sometimes even just jokingly calling people out on their "fillers" will make them realize it. I'm with agregoli too, sometimes we don't even notice our own and that's why I'm an advocate of bringing it to the person's attention! You might learn you have them too!
posted by slyboots421 at 9:24 AM on December 4, 2006

Perhaps because "um" is often more clearly pronounced than other place holders, and therefore sounds intentional or pretentious--like a faux grammatical element?
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:29 AM on December 4, 2006

In high school we worked on presentation skills in one of my classes. We were actually graded on the number of times we used verbal pauses - ums, ahs, and likes. It's a great way to learn to stop using them.

From the same class, one of the reasons people use verbal pauses is that the silence while collecting one's thoughts feels longer and uncomfortable to the speaker than to the audience. Try doing theater or film and you'll learn the same thing while trying to have a mock phone conversation - it takes discipline to hold the pauses and make it seem like you're actually talking to someone at the other end of the line!

Learning some basic presentation skills really helps lower the verbal pause count. Being conscious of your use of verbal pauses (and deliberately not using them) in a formal setting, such as a debate, will greatly reduce the occurrence of them in everyday speech.
posted by backseatpilot at 10:01 AM on December 4, 2006

I was once on an airport shuttle bus with a woman who used "I was like" and "he was like" an awful lot in her cell phone conversation. It annoyed the crap out of me. The way I changed the situation was to start counting in my head every time she said it. Even though I only started counting long after she'd done it enough to be annoying, I got up to 41 before we reached my terminal and I got off the bus. By that time it had gone from eyerollingly irritating to something so comical it was a real effort not to laugh out loud. Maybe try doing this, make a game out of it, see if you can beat your previous "um" record each day.
posted by bink at 10:08 AM on December 4, 2006

This is one of the askme questions i don't really 'get' - how can anyone else tell you why you hate something, with any degree of accuracy? All they can do is tell you why they hate something, and hope that you somehow identify with it. So i wouldn't be getting your hopes up for much of an answer.

That being said, if you want to 'get past your severe distaste' for 'um', then just get past it. The same way you'd get past doing a task you hate, or eating a food you don't like, or sitting through a boring piece of entertainment. Just force yourself: ignore it, will yourself to not react, and just move on.
posted by Kololo at 10:21 AM on December 4, 2006

What's the deal with that?

If you mean "what's the deal with um, specifically", you might be able to get an answer from a neuroscientist somewhere who with a fetish for the psychoacoustics of filled pauses, or something like that. Consult your local linguist or librarian, perhaps, if you want to go down that road.

If you mean "what's the deal with only one specific filled pause bothering me", the deal is that you're paying attention to ums. Why you started doing that is up in the air—how long you'll do it, likewise. However, it's likely you haven't been so attentive to and annoyed by "um" for your entire conversational life (have you? Since you were three or five?); if you do not intentionally bolster your annoyance, it should pass. Just stop reacting to them.

And is it possible to get past my severe distaste of other peoples' verbal static?

Yes. Just stop focusing on them. Gloss over them. Take a little mental vacation for the 0.8 seconds each one lasts. Get over it by getting over it.
posted by cortex at 11:13 AM on December 4, 2006

I've got to agree with Kololo.
Relax and get over it already. There are bigger things in the world to worry about.
posted by ducktape at 11:24 AM on December 4, 2006

I haven't really put much thought into this (although I am still chuckling at the Thrifty Rent-a-Car confirmation email that says to call their 800 number if anything "looks out of whack"), but I think generally in a situation like this a productive response is to use the awareness of someone else's verbal tics to check your own. If you're noticing lots of "uh"s, use it as a chance to audit your own choice of words.
posted by loiseau at 11:37 AM on December 4, 2006

The people I know who appear to have some form of OCD (about a third have been diagnosed) also almost always have some form of your problem.

I looked at your other questions to see if there was anything which would situate you somewhere on that spectrum in my opinion, and I found this (that I share to a degree) which does so moderately, and this, which does so weakly.

If there is anything to this, and I would prefer you to view it very skeptically, it can often be controlled by meditation, or in my experience, by listening to highly patterned music such as Bach. If you have or develop OCD at such a pitch a psychiatrist would diagnose you, it does often respond to SSRI's.

That "um" maddens you and "uhh" is neutral seems to me to parallel the weird specificity of OCD, where one person will compulsively wash their hands, another has to turn around four times before going to bed, and another cannot view buttons without having his or her skin crawl.
posted by jamjam at 11:56 AM on December 4, 2006 [1 favorite]

bink, I do the same thing. I once was at a presentation where we were encouraged to submit post-talk evaluations, and I included the fact that the speaker had said "go ahead and..." something like 156 times. I haven't seen this speaker since, so I'm left to wonder if my comments did any good.
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:14 PM on December 4, 2006

People say "ah" and "uh" and "um" because they know they want to keep talking, but they don't know what to say. They're retaining the conversation token, so to speak. Stephin Merritt (Magnetic Fields) is one of those souls that has consciously cleansed himself of this habit, according to Wikipedia, which leads to him getting cut off all the time.

Anyway, I thought it might help your tolerance to know that there is some function to these "words".
posted by Nahum Tate at 1:00 PM on December 4, 2006

Whenever anyone uses those sounds, they're buying time to think of what they want to say next without giving up the floor. They're searching for the best word. It probably makes their speech better than if they were to run on without taking time to find the best word. Convince everyone in the world to spend more time listening and the problem will solve itself.

As far as why "um" bothers you and "uh" doesn't, I have no idea.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 1:51 PM on December 4, 2006

Agreed that there is definitely a function to words like that. My 6th grade English teacher did drills of 2 minutes during which we were challenged to speak without filler words. We also recited poetry and did some other rhetorical training.

I never excelled at it, but what progress I did make also made ordinary conversations with my mom difficult: she always harped on me if I took more than two or three seconds to answer without saying "Umm," assuming that I'd gotten distracted or didn't feel comfortable answering... as though I couldn't possibly be thinking if I weren't making sounds. Since I realized that, I've consciously added some filler words back to appease her.
posted by scission at 4:26 PM on December 4, 2006

I've had this problem with various forms of verbal filler. I think the difficulty is that it's a positive feedback loop. Usually these sorts of verbal filler pass under the mental radar without being consciously registered, but once you begin to notice a particular sound it's hard to make it fade into the background again. Once it's in the foreground of your consciousness, it can start to be irritating, and the more irritating it becomes the more predisposed you are to notice every instance of it. I've had this happen with the verbal tics of various friends (such as the one who says "y'know" every few words.)

I think the best response is to try to suppress your irritation temporarily, so that the syllable doesn't make such an impression on your brain every time you hear it. Over time this may allow it to gradually fade back into your unconscious.
posted by fermion at 4:35 PM on December 5, 2006