“826 the Physicist looked around and up to where 28 the Mathematician still stood on the railed mezzanine, watching. ‘A remake of Paltron’s Curtain?’ she called out. ‘Is this what you teach your disciples now, Mathematician?’

” ‘No,’ the other educator replied from the upper walkway, her voice ringing out sharp and clear across the great room. ‘This one actually works, Physicist. 12 has apparently fixed Paltron’s errors.’

” ‘Fixed them? The Curtain schematic is over 1000 years old,’ she easily blustered. ‘Why, everybody knows…’

” ‘Before you fail the student, Physicist, ask to see her product. Ask many questions, and ask them many times, for you will not believe the first response–and likely not your own eyes, either.’

“Faced with this very public academic challenge, Physicist drew a deep breath, then faced back to 12, slowly nodding her head to the child. She settled herself in a chair, dutifully awaiting the demonstration, and watching the young girl scurry about her device, activating secondary power supplies, shunting data feeds, and generally doing complex, technical–stuff. After five fretful minutes, 12 looked to her grader, and the thing at the grader’s back. Her impish smile could not be contained.

“Hearing the unexpected rustling of foliage at her back, Physicist turned to the small patch of previously nonexistent jungle growth. The scales across her back tightened with a loud clatter, and she quickly leaped across the table to stand at 12’s side. The formerly extinct Talexian jrskan, a flesh-eating wolf-like creature dating from the planet’s pre-colonial days, charged upon the two, leaping high to clear the separating table. Physicist cried out and assumed a defensive posture against the beast, while young 12 merely laughed, and the jrskan vanished from existence.”

Another one is “…and stuff…”. As in “In speech class we practice diction, rhetoric, and stuff.”

Actually, none of these aberrations is really bad, until people start using them over and over.

“I was going to the store and, I mean, my car wouldn’t start. I tried calling the garage but, I mean, you know, all I got was one of those, you know, recorded messages.”

They were absolutely horrible and I worked hard to get rid of them. I much prefer an occasional uh, but I have found that nothing is better than anything else.

A similar construction is the Canadian, “eh?”, added after a sentence as if prompting the listener for approval. American English speakers also use a particularly annoying verbal gesture, the pause, usually marked by a really dufus-sounding “…uh…” inserted in a sentence while the speaker collects his thoughts and figures out what he’s going to say next.

“I was going to the …uh…store and…uh…my car wouldn’t start. I tried calling the…uh…garage, but all I got was one of those…uh…recorded messages.”

You may not have noticed yourself doing this, but it is a common feature of American English–so common we don’t realize we’re doing it. Myybe I notice it because my machine-gun Cuban Spanish barely slows down enough to let me catch my breath. It’s not that American English speakers are particularly inarticulate or illiterate, its just a bad habit many of them have picked up along the line and it has not been drilled out of them in school. Brits don’t do it, nor do other English speaking countries. I don’t do it, which has led some people to accuse me of talking too fast, or too “fancy”. I don’t mind, I am a fucking elitist, and proud of it.

“…uh…” drives other people crazy, and most Americans don’t even realize they are doing it, unless they’ve had formal speech training. But it makes us (American English Speakers) sound really dumb. It is especially noticeable when people are speaking extemporaneously in public, not so much when talking amongst friends or family.

Yes, I do often pause myself to search for the right word, when speaking English or Spanish, to think over what I’m going to say, or to try and think ahead and phrase my thoughts appropriately, but I just pause, or even change inflection slightly to distract the listener from my pause. But I don’t add the “…uh…” sound. My grandfather found this really annoying, because even politicians or educated speakers punctuated their radio and TV broadcast sentences with “…uh…”. It use to drive him nuts, and he barely spoke English at all (although he could understand, read and write it perfectly).

What does tickle my grouchy bone is the word “actually” when used like this. Clerk: “Actually, we don’t carry widgets.” “Actually, we do have those.” “Actually, the chef can cook a well-done hamburger.” “Actually, I went to the store.”

What does “actually” bring to the party, or do to make the sentence easier to understand? “Actually, I think people use that word when their veracity might be in question. Honest, I think so. Know what I mean? Unnerstan?”