# "For some reason"

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/for-some-reason/358142>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [May 25, 2006, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/for-some-reason/358142 "2006-05-25T07:13:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![dnooman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/839c29/32.png) [@dnooman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dnooman)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2006, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/for-some-reason/358142/21 "2006-05-26T06:06:16Z")

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[QUOTE=fetus]  
It’s supposed to, but for some reason it’s generalized to mean everything and thusly nothing at all. It’s now a meaningless colletion of syllables as the OP says–here in SoCal, anyway. (The locals here are big on talking nonsense and littering their conversations with meaningless fluff. At least every, like, fourth word is, like, “like” or, like, “dude”. That’s not an exaggeration. Wild redundancy and excessive repetition are both par for the course, and totally expected in everyday conversation. Uhhh, there’s a lot of, like, nonverbal pauses and, well, let’s just say you have to like listen for like an hour to get like a minute’s worth of like information.

Dude!

We really do talk like that. I caught it a couple years back, too.  
[/QUOTE]

I grew up in Irvine dude. Like, living in Ohio has like totally changed my speech patters for some reason. Not always for the better. 🙂

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**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2006, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/for-some-reason/358142/22 "2006-05-26T06:34:34Z")

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In my case it’s shorthand to “for a reason which I know but which would take too bloody long to explain and I don’t want to bore you”

For some reason, I kind of hate boring people.

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**Author:** ![Max\_the\_Immortal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Max\_the\_Immortal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_the_Immortal)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2006, 9:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/for-some-reason/358142/23 "2006-05-26T09:37:42Z")

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What Nava said, plus when I do something on a whim:

Some dude: “Do you have the time?”  
Me: “No; for some reason I left my watch at home this morning.”

In this case, I left my watch at home on a whim, and don’t know why I had this whim.  
I also tend to pepper my speech with “sort of”, “uh”, “like” and the like. I don’t feel that I use them as a “shield”; they’re more like punctuation marks. We all know that there is far more to speaking than just the choice of words. Tone, inflection, pacing, as well as stress and pitch patterns all play a role in communication. Additional, meaningless words can change a sentences pitch pattern, and therefore its meaning.

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