Comfort Words

Recently I have been observing the way people tend to reuse certain words or phrases, in extraneous ways, as a part of their normal conversation. Some favorites..."you know", "well", "actually", "basically", "just", "umm", and "like I said". Your high school speech teacher probably threatened you against the use of these "filler" phrases. But I like to think of them as comfort words. When you don't know what to say, but something needs to be said, they give you a nice segue into anything, or emphasize any sort of point you're hoping to make.

When I was first employed as an intern at HP, during my senior year of high school, I noticed many of my coworkers beginning their sentences with "so...". In general they were not making any sort of concluding statement, but merely changing the subject, answering a question, or remarking on something that happened last week. Although this method of starting sentences initially struck me as grammatically odd, I also implicitly connected it with the speech of a "real engineer". Somehow I overlooked the fact that my dad, who is a real engineer, does not speak this way. Gradually I started adopting this speaking style as well, and I thought I was pretty cool. Like a grown up engineer.

It turns out this may have been a bad idea. As cool as it sounded at the time, I later realized that comfort words are notoriously hard to abandon. They serve as an excuse to think while you're talking instead of thinking before opening your mouth. They also distract listeners from your real point by their repetitive nature. It's like hypnotism. Suddenly people start unconsciously waiting for the next "basically" to pop out, completely ignorant of whatever essential idea you were about to articulate.

So... My challenge for the week... Let's get out of our comfort zones and try some new words!