Um, y’know?

I first started listening regularly to the BBC World Service around 40 years ago, when I was living in Sweden.  In those pre-Internet days it was the best way to keep in touch with what was happening “back home”.  I actually had the times of “News about Britain” – a program that seems to have passed into history - written up so that I wouldn’t miss it.

And in those days, if a World Service presenter had said “Um” or “Y’know” they would have been instantly dismissed and quite possibly also executed.

Scroll forward to 2022 and it’s everywhere.  Presenters “Um” and “Y’know” their way through news, interviews and all the other content kindly delivered to us on SAMS Radio 2.  Many are pretty good and only do it occasionally, which I notice but can tolerate, but I’m sure there are some cases where the “Um”s and “Y’know”s actually exceed the real words in the item.  And then it drives me bonkers.  I find myself shouting at the radio “if we know then you don’t need to tell us so f@$k off!”

I was discussing this the other day with a friend, much younger than myself.  He did not have a problem with it, but then he grew up in the “Um” and “Y’know”  Era so, like everything you grow up surrounded by, did not even notice it was there.  If you grow up next to the coast you don’t notice the sound of the waves.  If you grow up by a busy road you don’t notice the noise of the traffic.  He initially said “Um” and “Y’know” were no more significant than pausing for breath.  I countered that “Um” and “Y’know” were noise-words that conveyed no meaning whatsoever and you might as well say “wombat”.  “Well, Brian, wombat, it was a game of two halves, wombat, and it could only have had one, wombat, ending.”

But then we discussed it further and realised that, actually, “Um” and “Y’know” DO have a meaning.  It’s roughly the same meaning as that little whirligig that comes up when you are trying watch a video online at a higher resolution than your internet speed can cope with.  It means “I’m talking faster than my brain can handle so I need to pause while my thinking machine comes up with whatever it is I’m going to say next”.

Back in 1984 reading the news took five minutes, and it was read at a measured pace with two second gaps between the stories.  Today it takes two minutes. In this high-pressured world presenters have to gabble to get all the information across within the 30-second attention span of their audience.  If anyone paused for two seconds the audience would tune out.  So it’s hardly surprising that their mouths are forced to operate faster than the human brain can keep up with (and some human brains are clearly more challenged by this than others).  That being the case, the “Um”s and “Y’know”s are entirely explicable.

But for me that still does not make them excusable.