This word makes up a surprisingly large chunk of the material of everyday conversation. Once in a while it catches my attention and I’m shocked at how disjointed and bumpy my sentences sound and how many “hedging phrases” like “well,” “kind of,” “I guess,” “you know,” “like,” and “um” poke out from the gaps between the words. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a perfectly ordinary part of conversation, and it’s unusual for anyone not to have at least a modest sprinkling of hedging words in their speech. But I thought it would be an—uh—interesting exercise to, you know, sort of completely eliminate them for like a day—or, well, almost completely, since I guess I did kind of trip up and say “uh” a couple of times. I was surprised that it wasn’t more difficult to speak without falling back on those habitual space-fillers, but all I had to do was talk a little more slowly.

Maybe as a sequel to this very minor adventure I can switch my space-filling words with more unusual ones. I could go with irrelevant words like “fork” or subtle variations on the standard reportoire, such as “you go” instead of “you know.” Well, kind of, I guess.