I have noticed that the average guy or gal is not particularly eloquent. Maybe it’s not surprising if someone can’t find the perfect adjective or turn of phrase, but it’s amazing how much trouble people have in finding commonplace nouns! Why would this be?
For example, a typical conversation would be:
*
“What did you do this weekend”
“Went down to, uh… Main street pub and there was a great uh… blues band playing. Saw, uh… what’s-his-name, uh… Paul from accounting there. Did you know he bought a new uh… van” *(etc)
I was listening to the hockey game tonight and the announcer came out with “…and he shoots the puck over the uh… boards”. That’s kinda strange considering this guys been calling hockey games for twenty years.
I know that language came relatively late in the game for Homo Sapiens, but as an individual we do use it all day long, for all of our lives; and you would think we would not struggle so much with nouns. Do they get pulled out of a different part of our brain when we’re talking?
Try talking with a bright but elderly person whose brain has short-circuited. Phone conversation with my 93 year old mother:
Mom: She had her computer with her…no…not her computer that’s silly… you know what I mean…
Me: What do you mean?
Mom: That thing you use down the hall.
Me: Can you give me more of a description?
Mom: It helps you walk down the hall.
Me: The hand rail?
Mom: No. You know.
Me: A walking stick? A walking cane?
Mom: No…with both hands.
Me: A walker?
Mom: Right!
She keeps her sense of humor about it and we’ve always liked to play guessing games. I guess that makes it easier. But I’m getting older. What happens when I can’t think of the right questions to ask or the right word either?
Modern speech is being changed on an almost daily basis. IMO not for the better. I blame Internet Chat for the majority of the next generations woes.
English has been bastardized and mangled for quite some time now, too bad the younger generation is much better at mutilating it than any before. It makes me sick too, but that’s how we evolve (don’t get me started).
Personally, I like relaxed grammar (one can start a sentence with “and”) but I still loathe incorrect spelling. Especially when it’s my own. Those too lazy to capitalize proper nouns get horrible diarhea in the afterlife.
The English language is always in a state of flux. Even the most eloquent and articulate speeches today look plain compared with, say, a speech written by Elizabeth I.
People have always used a more economical form of English in informal settings. A conversation may consist of sentence fragments and other grammatical errors which sound natural when speaking but look awful on paper.
Saying “uh” is just a bad habit. Many people have natural pauses while they consider their next words. (I know that I do. I have a slight speech impediment, and there will sometimes be a slight pause as I construct my thoughts into a coherent phrase or my words may get tangled.) Most probably don’t realize how often they say “uh” in any given conversation. I’ve even seen people touted as professional speakers who sprinkle it liberally into their speeches. Once a person realizes it, practice and dilligence can eliminate it nearly entirely.
Now, when it comes to being able to express ideas coherently, I think that’s an aspect of education. Today’s kids don’t often get training in speaking. Back when I was a wee young pup, we sometimes had to make oral reports on various subjects and sometimes had class debates. From what I’ve heard, that’s not so common anymore.
As an aside, I’m starting to wonder if they’re not teaching writing, either, though students assure me that they do have to write reports and the like. An alarming number of papers turned into my husband by his college students are painfully bad. Mixed tenses, excreable grammar . . . I’m not a Grammar Nazi, but I do find fault when a person’s grammar gets in the way of comprehension. On occasion, I’ve felt like I should call in a UN translator to decipher what the student was trying to say.
In the first case you use, I wouldn’t read too much into it about the downfall of the English language. I think the speaker is simply trying to provide more information than was requested and his brain is a little behind in recalling the data. Speaking before one thinks is not an uncommon problem.
I suppose your experiences about the average person’s eloquence depend on where you’re from.
I’ve seen off-the-cuff interviews of English men and women who were very articulate even when speaking extemporaneously.
It’s possible that our education system (and by our I mean the one in the U.S.) does not place a premium upon public speaking. Apart from theater classes that I took voluntarily, I was not required to learn to do speak in public except for a brief one-week lesson in 8th grade.
The “uh” always seems integral to transcripts of cockpit conversations before the plane goes down in the newspapers. You’d think crashing a 747 would concentrate the mind, but, uh, no.
My general supervisor is a nice guy and obviously has some talent to get where he is in large company. But talking to him one on one can be painful, he adds a “you know” to the end of almost every sentence. He does not do this when talking to a group though. I will go out of my way to avoid him just so I don’t have to listen to him, you know.
It does concentrate the mind, just not on speach. When the poo has hit the whirly thing, the brain goes into overdrive, but it’s working on solutions, not articulating clearly to your crew mate. It’s a bit like trying to hold a conversation while playing a musical instrument, not easy. And the more complicated the piece of music, the more your speach suffers.
After all, using terms like bus and mob are a sure sign the younger generation is ruining the language! Why, they don’t even know when to use a medial s! Illiterates, all!
My workmate (often cow-orker) solves this by completely shutting down every part of her brain not involved in drafting an email. Its almost like having to schedule the briefest conversation with her :rolleyes:
As an aside, there was a comedy series, The Day Today that featured a spoof documentary on an office “rationalisation.” One poor office worker had his workmates shout “UH!” at him every time he said it in a sentence. To be seen to be appreciated of course
There is nothing new about having pauses and hesitation markers (like “uh”) in speech. These have apparently existed through the entire history of human language. They are apparently no more common in contemporary English than in any other period of English and are apparently no more common than in any other period of any other language. (Does anyone have any research by linguists indicating differently?) We’re just not as aware of the pauses and hesitations in other periods and languages because we’re generally reading them, not listening to them, and these things are nearly always filtered out in writing.
I always got the impression that “ums” and “ahs” are just things people say while their brain catches up with their mouth. Not necessarily a reflection of their abilities with language, but possibly an indicator of the amount of attention they’re actually paying to the conversation.
Just clarifying - I could take for granted the uhs/ums/ers in everyday speech: many replies to this thread have given plausible justification why they are used.
BUT, why everyday nouns? They should be the easiest part of speech in any sentence; adjectives, adverb and their respective phrases can give the speaker pause to ensure the correct shade of meaning is about to be conveyed, but the speaker rarely has any options with a noun.
For example: "Go out to the uh…, garage and bring me back the green uh…, sweater I left in the uh…, car.
“Go out” and “bring me back” and “green” could have been substituted with many similar phrases, but those aren’t the parts that seem to trip up the speaker. It’s the discrete, commonplace nouns.
You will NOT hear: "Run, um I mean go out to the garage and um retrieve, I mean get me my uh emerald, well light greenish sweater I uh forget or uh left in the car.
Listen to someone who has trouble spitting it out and you’ll be surprised at how it seems that nouns are not being retrieved properly.
I just read John Burroughs’ book on “Camping with President Roosevelt,” which happens to be about 100 years old, and you wouldn’t believe the level of skillful expression, eloquent yet plain, and the high level of vocabulary, which was perfectly lucid even though we don’t use some of Burroughs’ expressions very much these days, in this short account.
I think there was a modicum level of expression, a minmum requirement if you will of formal discourse, that we simply lack. Any babbler can get a book contract, and spew tape-recorded nonsense that someone cleans up the worst rambloings from ('uh’s and 'like", 'you knows", etc.) and that’s a book. Once that level of disourse declines, the level of speech becomes less lofty. Eventually, we’ll be reduced to grunting and pointing, I think.
Look at any book from 1906 and see if you don’t agree.
I’ve had this problem for years (currently I’m 55 years old). I’m hoping a) someone who knows will tell us why this happens and b) tell us how to fix it!
Typical comment from me: "So this is a really long…bunch of words with a period at the end. Longer than a phrase, shorter than a paragraph…“Sentence”! That’s it!
I don’t “uh” or use any other filler, I just, sometimes, can’t think of the bleepin’ word! It often happens because my brain is stuck on one word which is not exactly the one I want.
I would also be curious if someone had an answer to this. I’m a fairly educated (Ph.D.) and reasonably articulate person, but I have a hard time recalling names for things during the course of normal conversation (including names of people, but also names for common items). It is worse, of course, under stress – but I can blank on a noun any time. It does not seem to be age-related, in my case. I have always been this way.
Most of us say “uh” and “um” a lot more than we realize, and we hear it a lot more than we realize too. It’s amazing to compare “clean” transcripts of conversations to unexpurgated transcripts, and unexpurgated transcripts to your memory. Generally, people really don’t speak in complete sentences, but we tend to remember conversations as going from one complete sentence to the next.
