Monday, January 28, 2008

You know, um, she's like...

When I was a kid, my father would ride me mercilessly to get rid of a speech tics.
"I have a funny story for you," I'd start.
"I'll be the judge of that," he'd reply. (He got that response from HIS old man).
The biggest thing was "um." I had a habit, as did many kids in their pre-adolescent years, of inserting "um" in mid-speech as a way to pause and think about what to say next. He dinged me on it constantly. I remember vividly riding in our old Willys Jeep through the woods one summer day trying to tell him something laced with "ums." He kept knocking them back at me like Arthur Ashe volleying at the U.S. Open.
He won. Eventually. He forced me to pause silently as I searched for the next phrasing and he allowed me to feel comfortable pausing because he wouldn't interrupt.
Today, it's almost impossible to pause in the middle of a sentence because whomever you're with will interject something. It's a massive problem in this era, and we'll take that subject up later.

Onward...

"Successfully achieved..." You can't unsuccessfully achieve, win, pass, modulate or do anything.
So when it comes to adverbs, I'll twist a line: "Trust yourself with adverbs the way you would trust a toddler with a butcher knife."

1 comment:

Jordan Guthmann said...

I'm sure radio stations everywhere have similar contests, but I remember listening to a contest on a Tulsa radio station where callers would phone in and have to tell a story for 30 seconds. The catch was that you were not allowed to used any vocal fillers (um, uh, like and sustained pauses). You would be surprised how many people struggled with the contest. Callers weren't even aware when they did throw in an "um."

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