Modern WisdomWhy Does Everyone Say ‘Like’ and ‘Um’ All The Time? - Valerie Fridland
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Why ‘Um,’ ‘Uh,’ and ‘Like’ Reveal How Language Really Works
- Sociolinguist Valerie Fridland explains how language constantly changes under two main forces: cognitive/articulatory pressures that make speech easier to produce, and social pressures tied to identity, status, and group belonging. She shows that features we criticize—like filler words, “like,” vocal fry, and dialect traits—are actually systematic tools that aid planning, comprehension, nuance, and social signaling. Large, global languages tend to shed certain grammatical complexities while gaining new kinds of complexity, such as stricter word order or richer discourse markers. The conversation also covers how social media spreads, rather than invents, linguistic trends and how biases against certain ways of speaking have real social and legal consequences.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFilled pauses like “um” and “uh” are cognitive tools, not incompetence.
They appear most when speakers are doing harder mental work (complex sentences, rare or technical words), signaling ongoing processing and helping listeners predict, process, and remember upcoming information—despite being socially stigmatized.
“Um” and “uh” carry different meanings and timing signals.
Research shows “uh” typically precedes short delays while “um” tends to signal a longer pause, so speakers use them in a relatively intentional way to manage turn-taking and listener expectations.
Silent pauses are not equivalent to filler words.
Experiments replacing “uh/um” with silence or coughs show that comprehension benefits disappear or worsen; listeners treat filled pauses as useful cues that speech will continue, whereas silence can suggest anxiety, forgetting, or turn completion.
The much‑hated “like” serves specific, nuanced functions.
Modern “like” marks approximation, personal stance, emphasis, or non-verbatim quoting (“He was like…”), letting speakers signal subjectivity and imprecision; younger speakers use it heavily, but often systematically, and can substitute forms like “about” once they understand its roles.
Language simplification is selective and traded for other complexity.
Large languages like English have lost many inflectional endings and irregular plural patterns due to adult learners and transmission issues, but gained complexity in fixed word order and pragmatic devices, so they’re not “dumber,” just differently structured.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesLanguages change because we’re always under linguistic pressures and we’re always something socially—those forces constantly swirl together.
— Valerie Fridland
Um and uh are basically the little loading wheel of the internet for your brain.
— Valerie Fridland
Most of the things we think of as bad speech aren’t bad at all—it’s just social and historical accident that we don’t like them.
— Valerie Fridland
As a sociolinguist, I love like…but as a mother, I understand why people worry about it.
— Valerie Fridland
Social media doesn’t really innovate language; it disseminates changes that were already there in communities.
— Valerie Fridland
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