Garbage words

Remember that what you're likely noticing and reacting to is the word's frequency, not its grammaticality.

Anne Curzan, Says Who?

When people talk, unlike when they write, their sentences often contain useless words and sounds. The most common are "like" and "you know." Others say "right" or "um" or favorite vulgar words. When we are talking and trying to think of what we want to say next, we insert these things to hold our place or to fill in the blanks.

And there are those who are overly fond of certain cliches. "At the end of the day" seems popular these days.

It is these pointless words and expressions that Anne Curzan is talking about in the line quoted above from her book Says Who? Usually, as she observes, it is the frequency of their use that bothers listeners, not the words themselves or how they are used in the sentence. She's right.

If someone said "you know" once every 10 sentences we might not even notice. But there are some people who can put two or three "you knows"  in a single sentence. Not only do we notice, but many of us get downright annoyed. Sometimes when I hear someone talking, I ignore what they are saying and just count the "you knows." Yet speakers probably doesn't even notice how often they are using the phrase.

It's natural that our speech should be different from our writing. When you are writing something, even a simple text, you have extra time to think, and you also don't want to take the extra time to write "like" and "you know" every few words. Speech, however, gives us little time to think, and if we pause too long, our speech may get interrupted by someone else, as so often happens in conversation.  And so we put in those garbage words and sounds to hold our place. We may not even notice, but if we do it often enough it is certain that other people will.