In “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness,” Clark Wheldon, writing for City Journal, discusses the use of vague filler words–”like,” “you know,” “sort of”–which function as a way to avoid saying anything concrete or specific:

“I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.”

It’s a useful reminder of the way in which we sometimes hide behind words, not just in spoken English, but in our writing as well, using language to avoid saying anything at all.

“Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.”

In the New York Times, Guy Deutscher explores the ways in which the language we grew up speaking alters our way of thinking about the world.

In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens examines the use of that ubiquitous filler word, “like.”

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of “like” has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables. But it didn’t start off that way, and might possibly be worth saving in a modified form.

Continue reading here.