What is the grammatically technical name for gratuitous “filler” words or phrases, such as in the post title?
That was a question/answer on Jeopardy about 10 years ago but I missed or forgot the response and it’s been, like, I mean, you know, bugging me since then.
I’ve heard it described as “Valley Girl” slang (from 80s California ‘Valley Girls’), but I couldn’t tell you it’s anthropologically correct name.
Tripler
Like, ohmygod! That’s sooooooo cool, you know!
That’s way too specific, and also too recent. I know “like” was used back in the '50s, by “beatniks,” and “uh” predates that. I’m curious to know how far back this phenomenon goes, e.g. did people in Shakespeare’s day use “filler” words? (yaknowwhatimean?)
I would wager that the phenomenon is a natural component of speaking. I have read that the use of “filler words” is basically to “hold the floor” and to prevent response from others. These filler words are most often substitutions for weak or lacking vocabulary. I still find myself using “call it what it is” to replace “you know” when I can’t remember (or don’t know) the real word for something.
“Like” in the 50’s and maybe even earlier was a way of being cool. You wouldn’t want to commit even at that level to caring what the real word might have been. I always favored “more like” in such phrasings as “Yeah, it was more like he didn’t even show up for the game.”
In summary, ignorance and apathy would account for the motive behind such words. To whatever extent a speaker is trying to convince me that they don’t know and don’t care, I politely tune out whatever they’re stumbling around to try to say. Like, if you don’t have the energy to care, why should I?
I have even observed well-trained speakers (e.g. Terry Gross on Fresh Air) using “you know” to excess in what appears to be an effort to be “street wise” or fawningly sympathetic to persons she considers inferior. It’s insulting and shallow.
I don’t know the word you’re looking for, but I’ve seen the term “vocalized pauses” used to describe the utterances you’re talking about.
The technical term is discourse marker, a subclass of “filler” words.
No, interjections are exclamations; the phrases cited in the OP are not emphatic enough to qualify.
Not really; “'pleonasm” implies redundancy, not mere lack of specific meaning.
Like, I was gonna say the same thing.
“Vocalized pause” refers more to things like “er,” “um,” and so forth, rather than actual words like “like.”
Discourse markers are common in other languages; a very common one in Spanish is o sea, which is used pretty much in the same way “like” is in English
Wow. That must be it. And I thought “perspectiveness” was the only new word I would learn today from the board. Them there prolixity and logorrhoea are “spot on”, too, but I’m afraid when I try to use “pleonasm” to im/de/press my associates, I’ll probably use “neoplasm”!
That may possibly have been the answer to the question you heard on Jeopardy, but it isn’t the term for what you described in the OP.
Word whiskers is what they were called in my schooling.
I was composing my previous response while Colibri was posting this one that is more applicable. The info on SU’s is great, too. Thanks.
I suspect that you may have misinterpreted what was going on, there. (Not that no one would ever deliberately insert one to represnt another’s mode of talking, but if an entire conversation is filled with them, it is more likely to be a natural event.) As Colibri noted, they are actually a natural part of speech, and not an affectation. I’ll have to scrounge around to find a citation, but these things have actually been studied. While there are people (notably one’s eighth grade teacher) who claim that they are a sign of sloppy or uneducated speech, they are actually used by all speakers based on the situation.
Generally, when a person is extemporizing on a topic about which they have not prepared remarks or on which they have not considered from a particular viewpoint, they will use such phrases as “place holders” as they try to think ahead to the best way to express themselves. It is a way to not keep stopping silently in mid-sentence while they seek the next word or phrase.
I would actually expect many people to fall into that sppech pattern when interviewed by Terry Gross, (as opposed to interviews by Larry King or Oprah Winfrey), because Ms. Gross does a very good job of approaching subjects from an unexpected perspective. An author of a book on vreeblestands can sit down with Larry or Oprah and answer a stock set of questions: “Why did you pick vreeblestands as the topic of your new book?” “Why should we care about vreeblestands?” “Where did you go to find the information you included?” All stock questions they have heard before and for which they probably have well rehearsed answers. When they sit down in the booth at Fresh Air (with Ms. Gross in a separate booth giving no visual clues to the questions she might ask or the follow-up she will pursue to the answer), she is liable to ask “How do you feel about your children discovering that you are the world’s foremost expert on vreeblestands?” “Didn’t I read that you grew up in a household with seven children? How did your place in the birth order affect your decision to become a writer?”* There is nothing wrong with her questions, but they are often (not always) unexpected and people generally have to think about their responses as they provide them–forcing them to place “spacers” into their statements as they try to juggle their thoughts and their speech, simultaneously.
*(Terry’s questions are generally a lot better than mine.)
tomndebb, while I agree with your assessment of Terry Gross’s approach to questions being far more evocative and more prone to get deeper answers, I believe you misread my comment about Terry.
It is not the interviewee whose “you know” utterances are distracting, but Terry herself whose use of “you know” seems contrived and to a degree phony. I suspect Terry doesn’t really fumble around for words the way she appears to when interviewing people from areas where she may suspect they have poor training, poor educational backgrounds, etc. It strikes me as if she’s trying to come across to that interviewee as if she’s “hip” or “on their level.”
It tends to work in her favor, more often than not, in that she’s able to get some decent responses from these people. It just strikes me as beneath her level of sophistication and dignity.
Here’s the wikipedia entry on “like”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_(preposition)
Note especially the quotative use of “like”. It’s a recent usage, and it’s definitively not an interjection, a filler, or a discourse marker. Figuring out how “like” is used in contempory English is actually rather difficult.
I’ve found it’s really hard to have a pleonasm when I’ve got logorrhoea. 