Distractional things

djw and I have discussed the tendency for people to keep talking -- that is, to never stop making noise while their brain tries to catch up to their mouths, or while they're still deciding if they have anything else to say.

"Uh" and "uhm" are the most common cases of this, something that you can hear almost anywhere, if you listen for it. I would say that you have to listen for it now, because we're so used to people saying it. I'm sure that, even though I'm conscious of the practice (and thus this blog entry), I probably don't «hear» them from day-to-day people. Professional speakers, however, are another matter. The traffic helicopter guy on the local radio station is bad for it. The funny-looking kid on the cable technology channel is even worse. As I've ranted before, I think professionals (whatever that means these days, as everyone can be in media) should have a better grasp of their language.

But these aren't the only ones. The younger generation has, like, their own words that they, like, use to fill in their sentences. And, you know, they do seem to grow out of them, but like, I still hear university students, you know, still use them.

I'd almost say that everyone has their quirks, their little expressions that have no place in their sentences, but seem to end up at the start, or at the end, of somewhere nestled in the middle. They have no purpose, in my opinion, but to make people sound like they have a lot more to say.

djw and I came up with a term for words and phrases like this: distractionals. A distractional's purpose is to distract you from the fact that the person didn't have anything to say for that moment, or that they don't know how to start or end a sentence correctly.

A few more examples, if I may:

The earliest case I can recall is my grade 10 Social Studies teacher, who liked to tack on "roughly speaking" to the end of nearly any statement made. It got to the point where a few of us kept tallies on our desks of the number of times in a single period he would say it. By the end of the semester, we had that whole desk covered, roughly speaking.



When discussing or debating a topic, my wife will, when looking to introduce her own point-of-view, will open with "You know what? My thing is..." For instance: "You know what? My thing is is that I don't think that squirrels should be able to vote before their eighteen." But usually not so silly.



People who repeat the question as the start of their answer are using distractionals. Granted, this is an expected and accepted action when writing an essay, or perhaps in formal writing, but doesn't belong in everyday speech. For example:

"Do you have your Air Miles card?"
"Do I have my Air Miles card? Yes, I do."

That commercial drives me crazy. Okay, okay, you could argue that we had just returned from a flashback in the woman's head about all the luxuries of the Air Miles card, and that we had to be reminded about the original question. But it's not an isolated incident. Even cases where the question is not directly repeated are common:

"What's your favorite lunch at McDonald's?"
"My favorite lunch at McDonald's is a Big Mac."

The answerer could have said simply, "A Big Mac."



Repetition. It can certainly be used for effect, to hammer in a point:

"Daily exercise makes you feel better. Daily exercise helps to increase muscles. Daily exercise helps to burn off calories. Daily exercise makes you look great!"

The above could have been said or written as a list ("Daily exercise makes you feel better, helps to increase muscles, helps to burn off calories, and makes you look great!") but the repetition is useful to hammer home the point of daily exercise. And I have no problem with that.

It's when people repeat the same start to subsequent sentences where the repeated part is not the point at all. It's unfortunate I can't remember the example, which is in a commercial by Kevin Trudeau, promoting his book (some self-help book I believe), on the same cable channel with the uhm-kid. During his spiel, he repeats the same seven or eight words at the start of every sentence, but they're not the important ones, and it just makes him look like he's trying to fill a one-hour talk with ten minutes of content.



In two different cases in a week, I hear people use "kinda thing" or "sorta thing". I can see the use of such a phrase in some instances ("he did a Sean Connery kinda thing", "I saw a robot sorta thing"), and that's fine. Here, the speaker or writer is casually saying that something is sorta-kinda like another.

But the way I'm hearing it lately doesn't fit into that reasoning.

"Then I backed into the parking spot sorta thing."
"She asked me yesterday for my driver's license kinda thing."

There's no "sorta" or "kinda" -- it's exactly what the speaker is saying! What's worse is that after I started noticing it (on radio, on T.V., from passers-by), I noticed that a friend of ours does it all the time. I'm not sure if this is a new phrase, picked up from today's media, or something I've missed all this time.

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I don't think everyone uses distractionals (except perhaps the occasional "uhm"), but it's becoming more obvious from those that do. When I explain the concept of distractionals to people, they invariably ask whether they have one, and I believe that they really don't realize they're using them. I don't know that they're necessarily bad, unless it gets to the point where your listener is so aware of them that they can count them (and look forward to it!) as with my Social teacher.

I think that's enough for now. I meant to also go on about the use of "thing" in every context, as a replacement word for any noun out there -- something that probably drives djw crazier than it does me.

I shall leave it for another time sorta thing.