Fighting to stay alert in my four-hour night class last week, I found myself perturbed by one classmate’s repetition of particular filler phrase. In response to our professor, this classmate recited a 30 second monologue in which she followed almost every sentence — and some sentence fragments — with, “You know?”
It actually sounded less like “you know” and more like “yuhnow” — all one word. And even though her voice got higher as she said it, she didn’t seem to be asking a question. If she was, she sure didn’t allow anyone time to answer.
For purposes of this story (and because I don’t know her name), let’s call this eloquently spoken classmate Lucy.
If Lucy were writing this column, this is how it would look:
“So there was this girl in my class, you know, and she just talked in this really annoying voice, you know, and I just sat there wanting to, like, stab my pencil into my eye, you know, cause she just wouldn’t stop saying ‘you know,’ you know?”
Wait. Was that a sentence?
I do envy Lucy’s strong lungs, however. She doesn’t seem to require breathing as regularly as most humans.
It may have been my newly heightened sense for this excruciatingly annoying phrase, but after Lucy spoke a few times, “you know” seemed to spread through the classroom like smallpox.
Suddenly, Lucy wasn’t the only one infected with inarticulateness. I caught at least three other students saying, “you know” in excess. If only Edward Jenner were alive today; perhaps he could tweak his smallpox vaccine to cure this pandemic as well.
“You know” seems to have become the new serial filler phrase, replacing the word “like.” People still overuse “like” but I feel valley girl linguistics like “totally,” “duh” and “as if,” that have been slowly fading out since the ’80s, are almost dead. They’re definitely on the endangered list. People have finally begun saving those phrases for their appropriate uses … if there’s ever actually an appropriate time to say “duh.”
But this only means we will adopt new phrases to fill the space; hence, “you know.”
Another rising filler phrase — one that I am guilty of using daily — is “I mean.” Say a friend asks if I want to go a party. Chances are I’d rather spend my night watching Netflix with my cat but instead of saying, “I don’t feel like it,” I say, “I mean … I just don’t really feel like it.” My version adds a filler phrase and two extra words but at least I use “like” appropriately.
I suppose my admitted guilt makes me somewhat hypocritical, but there is a point where filler phrases become unconscious noises. Define that line and never cross it. Or at least do others the courtesy of keeping your mouth closed in class as to not spread your filler words germs.
Tyler Killette is a junior majoring in mass communications and the news editor. She can be reached at tkillette@mail.usf.edu.
