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There’s something that kind of bothers me. Maybe it kinda does you too.
It comes up in this webinar I listen to regularly in which a rotating series of panelists—all highly educated professionals—opine on a difficult and complex subject. I’m fascinated by each episode and always feel elevated after listening. But something keeps distracting me—kind of.
One of the regular speakers inserts that phrase, most often in its elided colloquial form “kinda,” into nearly every sentence. Qualifying an idea is a sign of a thoughtful speaker; but not almost every idea. Sometimes two or three “kindas” even manage to make it into the same sentence. The discussions’ content remains stellar, but the peccadillos are jarring. It’s analogous to a three-star Michelin restaurant with visibly dirty carpets. I have trouble focusing on the proverbial chateaubriand.
I am the first to acknowledge the insidious nature of verbal tics—the ums, wells, likes, you knows, I means, sort ofs, yadda yadda—that clutter our speech. I myself am a recovering “you know” offender. Most verbal crutches are what I call “stallers,” phrases that give our slow-footed brains time to catch up with our runaway mouths. We’re all susceptible to this, especially anyone who does public speaking. That’s why these verbal viruses are prevalent, but that makes them all the more annoying.
Years ago, I worked on musical productions with a talented director prone to two irritating stallers. His preferred crutch was “Do you know what I’m sayin’?” Perhaps unconsciously practicing the rhetorical art of variation, he’d occasionally resort to his backup, “Does that make sense to you?” Of course, as a native speaker of English, I did know what he was saying, but I always bit my tongue when I was tempted to give a sarcastic reply. During our three-year collaboration we worked harmoniously, eased along by my frequent assurances that, yes, that made sense to me.
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