Not all filler words are created equal. Did you know there’s a difference between “ah” and “um”? Yeah, neither did I!
As a podcast editor, I hear people speak, a lot. All the nuances in their voice, the words they choose, and how they present themselves. And in this work, when I’m scrolling in the forums, other editors gripe about people’s overuse of filler words like “um”, “ah”, and “like” all the time.
Alexandra D’Arcy is my first guest on the podcast. She is a Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Sociolinguistics Research Lab at the University of Victoria, where she is also the Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Humanities.
Alexandra debunks the notion that ‘like” is a modern crutch word used only by the young and flighty. In fact, it’s more complicated than you think. Her book is titled “Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context; 800 Years of LIKE”. That is a mouthful for me, so I asked her to dumb it down for me who’s only been to radio school, not an academic, and wanted to know what the heck does discourse-pragmatic variation even mean!?!?!
We discuss the many jobs that “like” has, the criticism of women’s language, and what really is modern language.
Here are Alexandra D’Arcy’s “like” examples:
- FINAL LIKE (adverb, ‘as it were’)
- He was quite gentle and quiet LIKE. (Corpus of Historical American English/Uncle Tom’s Cabin/1852)
- We need to smarten it up a bit LIKE. (Toronto, woman, born 1927)
- DISCOURSE MARKER (adverb, ‘for example, ‘approximately’, ‘in this way’, ‘let me illustrate’, etc.)
- They never went out in a small canoe. LIKE, we went from here to Cape Beale. They had great large war canoes. (Victoria BC, woman, born 1875)
- Och, they done all types of work. LIKE they ploughed and harrowed. (Southwest Tyrone, man, born 1943)
- It’s probably about a bit longer than this room. LIKE it’s probably like that wide and like a bit longer. (Victoria BC, boy, born 2006)
- ALSO THE DISCOURSE MARKER, but after a verb that introduces quoted speech
- He said LIKE “Stored water is just like stored dollars.” (Victoria BC, man, born 1935)
- Imagine being told by your parents LIKE “We know you have it in you.” (Victoria BC, man, born 1959)
- DISCOURSE PARTICLE (adverb, but put focus on what follows or allows speaker to mitigate claim on truth or authority)
- Well right in front of that they had boards LIKE built across. (Victoria BC, woman, born 1874)
- They were just LIKE sitting, waiting to die. (Scotland, man, born 1925)
- His father had LIKE a restaurant cafe in Regent Street. (New Zealand, man, born 1955)
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Our Conversation:
Alexandra D’Arcy
Discourse pragmatic variation discourse is, you know, the talking that we do, and I like to frame it as that online processing that happens where it’s unplanned speech so you’re simply caught up in a conversation with somebody, and the pragmatic piece. The pragmatics are all of that, meaning that we get that may not be encoded directly in the words or, which is signaled to us by the use of little helping words or helping expressions, so it helps us navigate what’s happening. As it happens, a little bit like street signs will say you have a turn coming up, this course pragmatic markers work like street signs in that they help us navigate our way through a conversation so that we understand the conversational turns as they happen. The in context piece of that is looking at the context in terms of linguistic structure and in terms of social structure, what are the things that are bracketing the conversation that helped give meaning to what’s happening, and that give us clues about what those helping words and helping utterances are doing, as we make our way through a conversation.
Mary Chan
So what you’re telling me is that it’s fine it’s normal we all do it, apparently, like you said, there’s been 800 years of it.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Of, like, yeah, like changing there’s been way more than 800 years of, like, like is from Old English but it’s been changing for 800 years and taking on new meanings and their new forms of like, have been evolving in the language consistently for 800 years.
Mary Chan
Going back to it’s not a bad thing then.
Alexandra D’Arcy
It’s not a bad thing it’s not a bad thing, no! No like is not a bad thing. Um is not a bad thing. Ah, not a bad thing. Yeah, no, not a bad thing. I mean, not a bad thing,
Mary Chan
But what about when, in a traditional podcast sense, and there is no video it’s just audio only, and it becomes a distractor where we would hear and blah blah blah and it’s like okay get to your point, because I can’t see that you are giving me those visual cues. So, is it bad in that sense when it’s audio only?
Alexandra D’Arcy
I totally get what you’re saying. Of course if they weren’t there, all you hear is silence, because you have nothing. At that point, so uh and um, first, are not the same as like. So uh and um mean, I am finding my way through this conversation, I’m looking for the right word I’m looking for the right turn of phrase, I want to make sure I’m saying this in a way that is comprehensible, I want to make sure I’m saying it in a way that isn’t going to offend anybody. There’s all kinds of things and signaling, and they are there to help the speaker hold the floor, so they’re letting the other person know I’m not done. I’m processing there’s something actively going on. And I need time, they have a real job. And there’s a really interesting difference too between uh and um. They’re not even exactly the same. If you actually pay attention to what’s going on around an uh and an um. It’s more often the case that what comes after an um is more complex in some way than what comes after an uh.
Mary Chan
Really?
Alexandra D’Arcy
Yes, so it could be that it has a much more complex syntactic structure. It could be that it’s a really difficult concept that’s being conveyed. So it’s not that you never get uh before something complex, but rather, if you look at it and you model it quantitatively and you think about statistical probabilities. Isn’t it amazing to think of language in that way, but in terms of statistical probabilities. More often than not, signals that something that is in some way complex is coming.
Mary Chan
Wow. Yeah, that blows my mind.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Right? I know. Language is amazing. I love it, I love it for so many reasons and like some people think that like, sometimes does that work. I’m less convinced that it has that job. And the reason is that um’s and uh’s tend to be surrounded by dead silence on either side so there’s an what we would call an audible pause in the speech signal, and like, very often does not have those pauses on other side of it. So, to me right there it’s already doing something different, but then when you look at a conversation and you start to pay attention to where the likes are showing up. You see that they’re doing, like has a lot of jobs. If it has that I’m still thinking function. It’s a very very minimal function for it.
Mary Chan
What other jobs does it have because I think when I’m back in elementary school and it’s like or as. It is going to be used as a simile is that right. Yep, oh my gosh, I remember that.
Alexandra D’Arcy
You’ve got it, you’ve got it.
Mary Chan
And then I think back to growing up in the 90s, where it’s like, like, this is a valley girl. So those are generally the only ways, I hear like so what are the other jobs that like does?
Alexandra D’Arcy
Oh, it has so many, okay so we don’t talk very often about the fact that it’s a verb, I like apples, and that’s totally uncontroversial. Like has a bunch of jobs that are uncontroversial we think of them as being fully grammatical and we don’t have a problem with it. What’s really interesting is that all of those likes sound the same way. So they become confused and we, it’s hard to recognize that it’s doing lots of jobs so the verb. Fine.
Mary Chan
Everybody agrees with that one works.
Alexandra D’Arcy
No one has a problem. It’s a noun. I like apples, oranges and the like.
Mary Chan
Oh wow you’re right okay.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Right? No problem there. Okay, it has that adverbial function, it can be a conjunction where it means, as it can be a conjunction where it means, as if. All of those things wholly unproblematic, but now you start to get into some of the newer ones. For me, they’re really really interesting ones and we can start with the like that shows up at the end of a sentence, which is more uncommon in North American varieties but it’s certainly not completely missing from our options, in particular, it’s used by older speakers if it’s used by anyone, but it’s the like at the end of a sentence that you would associate with, Irish, English, for example, so you get a light at the end of a sentence. And it’s actually an adverb there where you can translate it, you could gloss it, it means as it were. So it’s not empty. So none of the likes are empty which is really interesting, even though some of them are harder to gloss than others but the one at the end of a sentence means as it were. Then, from the end of the sentence, which is, if you think about this, it’s fascinating how language works so I’m hoping this is one of those moments where you again go Oh that’s so cool, you can do this. If you simply hear a like at the end of a sentence what you think of as a sentence. And it’s in a sequence of running speech. When we’re listening, people would make talk, just conversationally, sometimes that happens in sentences and sometimes those sentences are really hard to isolate. That’s always a bit of a moment for my students when I make them sit down and transcribed verbatim what people have said, it’s a little different in a context like this. I’m trying really hard to speak in sentences and seem articulate and knowledgeable. But when, when you listen if you sit down on the bus for example and you listen to people’s conversations and you try to parse out, there’s where a sentence starts, and there’s very clearly where a sentence ends and the next one begins, that’s really hard to do because off the cuff conversation that’s spontaneous. That’s vernacular, that’s just about sharing experiences and life and making a connection with someone, it doesn’t follow those rigid structures that we associate with the standard language is written. So now, in this online context. If you’re simply listening to the speech stream. Is that like at the end of a sentence or is that like at the beginning of a sentence, where is it occurring? It’s structure and what’s its job. That gets tricky.
Mary Chan
It gets mish-mashed because people are thinking while they’re speaking.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Yes. So then when that happens, we talked about ambiguity right it’s like structural ambiguity, is it stuck on at the end does it mean, as it were, or is it helping launch into what’s coming next. And the reason it can become ambiguous like that is because, like has this sort of core meaning of similarity. So even in glossing it as, as it were, there’s that semantic flavor of similarity. So now, if we think of it as being at the beginning of a sentence. There’s that ambiguity right that’s in the structure is it at the end is it beginning, and it gets re parsed as being not on the end of this sentence but actually on the beginning of this sentence and when that happens, you get this new like, which I call a discourse marker. It’s a discourse marker in the literature and a marker is those street signs that I was talking about earlier. So it tells you how to navigate, what is the connection between what I’ve just said, and what I’m about to say. So, it could mean, for example, it could mean let me clarify, it could mean let me illustrate, so you’ll hear something say, As a child, I never had any experiences with that, like the first time I ever knew about it was when my grandmother died. Where it’s literally saying, for example, let me illustrate this and so it ties those two utterances together in a very concrete way.
Mary Chan
But how did we then come to use the word like and not use the word for example?
Alexandra D’Arcy
Well we never I mean you could use for example there. But, you know, another word you could use there would be indeed.
Mary Chan
Oh yeah, that just seems to proper English there, indeed.
Alexandra D’Arcy
But indeed is also a discourse marker and it came from a phrase, it used to be two separate words, it actually used to be a prepositional phrase in deed where deed was a noun, and now they’ve coalesced as a single word, and they have this job of this, it has that same job of discourse marking where it ties things together, but it happens so long ago in the language that we no longer recognize it as innovative new colloquial exceptional. It was then incorporated it happened before the language was standardized so it just made its way into the standard language, but it’s it’s the exact same kind of thing, it’s just older, so we don’t get quite so upset about it.
Mary Chan
But what about then about the portrayal of female speech. So using the word, like when said by a female is judged more harshly than when said by a male. So where did that come from?
Alexandra D’Arcy
That’s such an interesting question. You know what, that’s not just like that’s anything that we perceive as new, so we can start there. Anything that’s perceived as new in terms of language change becomes associated with women, and with younger women in particular, teenagers and early 20s get targeted particularly harshly in this framework. It’s because young women tend to be the leaders of language change anyway.
Mary Chan
Yes, we’re leaders!
Alexandra D’Arcy
We are leaders! I always say that to my students into the women, thank you very much stand up and take a bow. If we listen to you we know where the language is going, you are at the forefront You are the Vanguard. We should thank you for pushing all of these innovations further and further and further, and instead we tend to denigrate what they do. Because women in general are denigrated within our broader society and culture. See being in podcasting, you must see this, where women often get letters written to them, or emails, they take them down for their language.
Mary Chan
Especially too when I worked in radio before podcasting and I was in radio for 20 years and working with female voices announcers that were on the air. Women voice would always be judged more harshly or I would produce a commercial with a woman’s voice and it would be sounded “annoying” as somebody would say like, but another client would love her voice so the harsh judgment against women voices as definitely they’re here in the podcasting space too.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Yup, no, it’s it’s very real and as I say it’s not just like so. Another thing you’ll hear me doing it a little bit but younger speakers do it more than I do. Sometimes my voice sounds almost as though, a stick is being run across the fence. So I get quite crackly at the end of a sentence or try yeah the vocal fry. Super fry. That one isn’t necessarily when they are young women do more than men. And in fact, if you listen to NPR, many, many of the men who are on NPR have heaps of vocal fry. They don’t get hate mail for it, but the women do. So it sets that contrast up really concretely and really nicely but the exact same thing is happening but when it comes from a woman we judge it very harshly and when it comes from a man. We’re kinder, or forgiving, or we simply don’t notice it at all. And so like has become wrapped up in part of this, partly because of this tendency anyway that young women need change. Also because like is one of the features that came in in North American context anyway to be associated with the California Valley girls.
Mary Chan
Yep, that’s what I’m thinking of,
Alexandra D’Arcy
Yeah, they weren’t the first group to use it, and the like that they get blamed for the young women really get blamed for too is the like that shows up inside sentences, and the like that shows up before a direct quote of somebody else’s speech or thought or action. And it’s because those were features that they definitely deployed they were part of their repertoire, but they weren’t uniquely part of their repertoire, but they were a very salient social category. And so popular ideology and perception maps them on to that group, and they get blamed, but neither of those features originated with them at all.
Mary Chan
It’s almost like history comes in cycles right so our modern day would be the valley girl equivalent but your what you’re saying is that it has been around for a long time.
Alexandra D’Arcy
A much longer time and it’s interesting because the like inside sentences. The like at the beginning of a sentence, definitely, but also the like inside sentences was used by the beat poets and the beat writers, and that’s the one that people tend to get particularly irked by. And the reason is that you can’t gloss it you can’t justify to yourself, well they’re really saying, for example, it’s really hard to think what it means, if someone says, We were like jumping up and down. What does that like mean? And the reason is that it’s not glossable in the same way, it’s doing a completely different job so either it’s saying, I need you to focus on the jumping, it’s the jumping, that is important in the sentence. It may also mean a mitigation of authority. So I’m going to say we were like jumping up and down. But I want you to understand that I being a little bit hesitant about whether it was really jumping up and down so I don’t I don’t want to sound like an authority on this. I don’t want to say categorically it was jumping. So it’s a softening, as it were, and so that like is harder, because how you interpret it really depends on what’s going on in the conversation, but that’s one that people are very very sensitive to.
Mary Chan
Yeah cuz when you first set it without explaining I just thought, Oh, why do they like just say you’re jumping up and down. But the authoritative piece that makes sense now when I hear it like I’m, I am literally running through my head all the different podcasts, I have ever edited thinking about all the different speeches and it’s gonna change the way I edit now.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Yeah, I get an A+!
Mary Chan
Or it’ll take me longer because then I want to pause, hit rewind and they’d be like, Ooh, that’s why they use it at there. Oh interesting.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Right? I know. Now you’re gonna be analyzing it I’ve made you a linguist.
Mary Chan
Oh no. I show up to class now at UVic right?
Alexandra D’Arcy
There you go. And this is one of the things I love about language I get I gave a presentation a public presentation, maybe a year and a half ago and my students were were tweeting the event and they tweeted me saying, every time you open your mouth, you’re just spitting out history. I don’t remember saying it, but I thought. Damn, I’m good because that’s true, because there’s so little that happens in language that is new in the sense of, it has truly emerged. Just now.
Mary Chan
But then what is that example of something that is actually new? If everything is just recycled and used over and over again.
Alexandra D’Arcy
What is modern, that’s the definition of slang it’s invented on the spot, it’s used for a very short time, and then it passes out of use, you know, the joke is as soon as your mom starts using it you know it’s not cool anymore. So my son gives me grief for that all the time he’s 13, and I’ll come along and I’ll say oh I heard this really cool expression and he just looks at me and he says well I can never say that again. So, I mean, I mean that’s the definition of slang, but so many things that we think are new aren’t like is one of them for a while there we could put all before quoted speech, and there was the idea. She’s all Wow, that’s really neat. And we thought that was new, and it isn’t new, either in the sense that, that all emerged really naturally out of other uses of all are saying she’s all wet, that, you know, you could say like something is all that, she’s all, where you use all to sort of intensify an adjective. That’s not new either. Many, many of the forms have been around at a very low level they just have very low frequencies. And then something happens, whether it’s in the social context or the linguistic context that allows for it to be picked up and deployed, sometimes in new ways, and some ways in ways that are just increasing the frequency of a use that already existed.
Mary Chan
How do you find the influence of modern day media and the internet change language?
Alexandra D’Arcy
I have two answers to that. The one I and I think this is real and one of the things that’s happening is there’s this debate going on that says, in my field anyways, where we study language change and how it happens and a very long held belief is that for real language change to happen in other words for something to happen in the vernacular in the day to day, that doesn’t apply to just a restricted group and a specific time or place for example, for that to happen, we’ve always said you really need face to face people need to be together, they need to be engaged in the conversations that are simply life. In order for substantive change to happen, so we’re not talking about lexical items.
Mary Chan
Defined lexical items. What’s that?
Alexandra D’Arcy
Like a simple a simple noun or verb that maybe you pick up, you heard someone say it on TV and you thought that it was cool. Or maybe you hear somebody say call a cookie a biscuit. You don’t realize that that’s quite regionalized, and so you start saying yeah I’m just gonna start calling cookies biscuits. That stuff’s really easy and you can pick it up anywhere you can pick it up from the movie doesn’t matter you don’t need the social context, or even more information about the linguistic context because it’s a simple replacement of this word for that word that already exists and I get that, there’s no rules to how I use it, it just means, as long as I understand what it signifies, I’m good to use it. So we’ve always had that position. But one thing that has been happening. Particularly since the post World War Two era, and this has been noticed for a huge number of changes in a wide variety of places, is that the rate of change appears to have increased since. Once you get into speakers born after the Second World War. So, I think that part of what’s happening there is increased access to speakers from more places from more diverse backgrounds. Through all different types of media, whether it’s television, whether it’s the internet, whether it’s increased access to film from other places. Better telephone connectivity, but there’s also been a shift that goes alongside that in terms of access to travel. If you wanted to take a big long trip you’ve got on an ocean liner, the commercial jet came online in 1960. If we don’t think that that changed how people get in touch with each other and exposure, face to face, around the world, we have to take account of that in our model I think that that’s a big part of it so it’s, I think that different media are a piece of it, but they’re not a huge piece of it because I still firmly believe that you need, not just face to face but some kind of exposure beyond what you would get in a movie to truly understand new linguistic forms. And the reason I say that is because using these words is at these innovations is rule governed always. So, you can’t just use like whenever you want to. I know it feels as though you can stick a like anywhere.
Mary Chan
It sounds that way sometimes.
Alexandra D’Arcy
I know but when you look at it really closely there are places you can’t put like you have to learn the rules, there are really complex grammars that go along with all of these forms linguistic rules and social rules, and you can’t get that there’s just simply not enough input in a movie, for example, but the other piece of it is, there’s amazing stuff that’s happening say on Twitter, in instant messaging, in text. That’s really innovative, really exciting, which is a new mode. So that to me isn’t about individual forms, it’s actually about a mode of communication that has been emerging very very rapidly. That allows for the diffusion of forms on a very very broad geographic range, because you’re talking with people in this online place where you’re mixing together things that are very very formal and standard and conservative with things that are very very new and hip and vernacular, and and digital.
Mary Chan
Even something as simple as I still like to put periods at the end of my sentences. But my husband’s niece who is just turned 18 was like, oh yeah I only do that when I talked with adults.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Exactly right? That is so not hip. You could come across as almost being angry.
Mary Chan
Yeah, that’s what she was saying that if you put a period on something you are like, this is how Yeah, like, yeah, I didn’t know that. Okay.
Alexandra D’Arcy
Yeah, yeah, it’s almost like it’s almost like a top or you’re just shutting down the conversation.
Mary Chan
That’s fascinating. Okay. As a final question. What would you like to say to all the podcasters and podcast editors who have been editing out, like, um’s, ah’s and think filler words are bad, what would you say to them?
Alexandra D’Arcy
I would say that filler words are a balance. So I do acknowledge that there comes a point at which we say, are we think, I just can’t stand here one more, or like this and so that’s a real thing. And the reason is that these features are very much stylistic. So if you’re looking for a very very formal style or something that doesn’t sound as though somebody is having a conversation in a coffee shop with their friend. Then there does come a point at which the likes and um’s and uh’s, and the you knows are disproportionate to the style that you are trying to emulate in a particular recording or show or podcast. So it’s it’s that stylistic point. So I think to me there’s a, it’s a balance between how formal is this meant to be, how conversational is it meant to be. And at the same time recognizing that if you take all of them out speech starts to sound incredibly stilted and impersonal and standoffish. We do know that using those features makes you sound more personable, more likeable, more down to earth, more approachable, more trustworthy. So they’re important. They play a really critical role, and yet at the same time I do acknowledge that there is a tipping point. And that tipping point relates to stylistic factors.
Mary Chan
That’s beautiful, you’ve blown my mind on a few things. I love all the information that you gave me. This has been so helpful. Thank you so much.
Alexandra D’Arcy
You’re very welcome. This was super fun.
