Fillers that Don't Fill Anything

 

Fillers that Don’t Fill Anything

You know ... I mean ... er ... um ...

When I was teaching in a private university, I realized that students wanted to express themselves in English fluently, but went about it in the egregiously wrong way ... could not distinguish between speaking fast and speaking fluently.

When one speaks fast, they tend to use filler words to complete their thoughts that they started blurting out, expressing inchoate ideas; fluency, on the other hand, has the idea formed in the mind completely and only then finds expression through the mouth.

I have my own metric–of course, tailor-made for me–for speaking fluently: You do not change horse in mid-stream. OK, I got in a cliché there, but to explain–Open your mouth only after you have created a full sentence in your mind.

I really do not know when, where and how I fixed within myself this mode of organization of thoughts. The idea must have emerged, rightly or wrongly, that organization of thoughts in a language is the mark of one’s fluency in the language. Maybe, I should blame Noam Chomsky.

Perhaps it dawned on me when I was reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. She seemed to write in paragraphs, like one sentence per paragraph, no matter the number of words. It tested my patience and I had to go through the sentence again and again to catch her meaning. If Ayn Rand did this to me, you may well understand my difficulties with all the other luminaries, say, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Rushdie, Arundhati Roy et al. There could have been other reasons (like their philosophical underpinnings) but I put it down to the typical length of their sentences.

Yet, I did not go as far as Ayn Rand went on this; I limited myself to in the range of no more than 15 to 30 words, give or take a few. Please note I am not comparing myself to literary high priests. This was in the manner of just an example.

During my days of formal class-room teaching, maybe sub-consciously, I put the above word limits on my lecture expositions. This became a matter of habit, not of any conscious restrictions. My students, after about a couple of weeks, realized that there is a price to pay if their concentration was diverted, even if only briefly–they could lose the train of thought: catching, if they would at all, the tiger only by the tail. I also used extensive hand gesticulations (including emulating toddler running around in a big hall, to explain trains and planes tilt towards the inside of the arc of a curve) as the subjects I taught were amenable to visual learning, reasonably mathematical though they were.

 It did have an effect on the pace of my delivery, but quite not discernibly so. I was never behind colleagues who were also teaching their students in the other sections in this multi-section course. After about ten or fifteen lectures, I would draw the students into a discussion of this habit of mine. Invariably they pointed out to this characteristic of my lecture delivery and said that it took time for them to adjust to it. They expected breaks in mid-stream in the delivery and there were none!

No fillers, I mean!

Oops, there was this filler, in this post, in the above sentence!

Over the past few years I have developed the habit of watching American news on YouTube podcasts, so that I myself can judge the bias of the podcaster. Whether I am successful or not in my chosen useless effort, I realize that the presenters are full of these filler words and beat Ayn Rand in posing questions to their guests, in which conjunctions galore. I hate conjunctions.

This grates on my nerves! I lose the continuity of my thought as my mind wanders through the extensive, common place hand gestures and eye-rolling etc. they engage in. These are true fillers, carrying hardly any meaning. Sometimes I believe that this is my deficiency and not the fault of the presenters, as they are into the presentation zeitgeist (possibly underwritten by PowerPoint Presentations) and I am of the old school. Possibly this is taught in our universities under the rubric of Soft skills. Let me tell you, these skills are to be developed by oneself and not taught by others in a rigid class room setting.

When someone is telling a story (a class room lecture ought to bring about this ambience), soft skills do emerge involuntarily. Just listen to yourself as you carry on a conversation with your family members. Your soft skills are there ready for you to invoke them. It need not be taught. And, these filler-words are not in your universe. You are conditioned to use them and if you do not, you do not belong. The zeitgeist has bypassed you, like it did me!

If you wish to get through to your listeners, slow down, do not interrupt yourself by starting out on an inchoate thought, form your thought as completely as you think it needs to be delivered and then, open your mouth. I have not tested this idea for its efficiency, but I am sure I am on solid ground on effectiveness.

You know ... I mean ... er ... um ... – Avoid these as plague.

Raghuram Ekambaram