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This was inspired by a column in the SMH where they had a short paragraph complaining about how these days everyone's peppering their speech with "like", "you know", and "actually","basically", and "literally"
Does anyone have any theories on this? And why those words in particular?
My own theory centres around the way that none of these words actually (there I go again) add much meaningful content to a sentence. Add that to the way that socially it's become much less acceptable to stop and think before speaking, you're expected to reply RIGHT NOW even if you have nothing meaningful thought up yet, and so you start inserting all sorts of qualifiers and extra words just to give you time to think of something relevant to add. I'm still not sure why those particular words, although I think it may have something to do with the way it's easy to put a rising intonation on them..
Does anyone have any theories on this? And why those words in particular?
My own theory centres around the way that none of these words actually (there I go again) add much meaningful content to a sentence. Add that to the way that socially it's become much less acceptable to stop and think before speaking, you're expected to reply RIGHT NOW even if you have nothing meaningful thought up yet, and so you start inserting all sorts of qualifiers and extra words just to give you time to think of something relevant to add. I'm still not sure why those particular words, although I think it may have something to do with the way it's easy to put a rising intonation on them..
