Other people prefer "basically" – basically this, basically that. Young people averse to or ignorant of anything beyond two syllables will simply say "like" – like, uh, you know, like!
These space fillers are what we English teachers broadly call expletives, another and more interesting meaning for which is "curses" or "swear words," the sense in which the Watergate Commission peppered the transcripts of the Nixon tapes with "Expletive deleted." I have a feeling that if we deleted all the expletives from our speech, precious little would be left.
A very informative Website called the International EFL (English as a Foreign Language) Café (www.internationaleflcafe.com) has more to say about expletives and swear words: "The mysteries of English orthography [that’s the study of letters and words – BD] result in many words in that language appearing in writing with four letters. This expression does not refer to all such words. Some few of those words, scorned in polite society but redolent with earthy Anglo-Saxon pungency, have become known simply as four-letter words. Common popular or slang terms for excretory functions, sexual activity or genital body-parts (for example) thus have their own artificial and euphemistic linguistic category."
Not to be unduly and uncharacteristically prim, but I don’t think I have to list down what those four-letter words are. But why the reference to "Anglo-Saxon pungency"? Ah, this is where I launch into my one-minute history of the English language, something I incorporate into every introductory lecture in my writing courses.
Here goes: English began as a form of German – itself part of the so-called Indo-European languages to which Hindi and Sanskrit also belong – and crossed the channel to the British Isles with the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the 5th and 6th centuries BC, displacing the local Celtic languages. In 1066, William of Normandy invaded England, and with him came French and its roots in Latin. Thus, English now had two main streams – the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) and the Latinate.
Why is this important? Well, let’s take the word "blood," derived from the Old English "blod" and the German "blut." That seems short, simple, and straightforward enough – and these are, indeed, typical of the Anglo-Saxon part of English. Like short knives, these words deliver their meaning with a quick, no-nonsense punch in the gut. That explains how and why cuss words work – they’re meant to hurt, not to charm.
The charming we must leave to the Latinate side of English, with which lawyers and doctors, among others, have become especially and hopelessly besotted. Latin adds appendages to words – like prefixes and suffixes – to change or to qualify their meaning, aside from dealing with tenses and conjugations; thus, the simplest root words tend to grow into veritable gardens and orchards of expressions. And this is how a plain notion like "bleed" can develop into the more elaborate "exsanguinate" (beloved of X-Files fans).
According to "The Sanguine Home Page" (it exists, I kid you not!), "The word sanguine comes from the Middle English word sanguin, from Old French, which in turn comes from the Latin word sanguineus, meaning blood or bloody, which comes from the word sanguis, of obscure origin. Pronounced san’guine, the word means, in a nutshell, red or cheerful. This web page studies the word sanguine in great depth, exploring its meanings, its composition, and its uses in classic literature."
The elongation of a word seems to give us just a little more time to savor its meaning or to accept its inevitability; some people, though plainly dead, may prefer to be deceased. It sounds just a little more tolerable to exfoliate than to shed hair, which is why we are more likely to pay three times the price for something that might advertise itself as an "express exfoliation service" than a quick haircut. An "extrajudicial settlement" sounds far more legal and binding than a private deal.
On the other hand, for sheer emotional impact, nothing beats the Anglo-Saxon. I’ve yet to hear a discombobulated gentleman – no matter how discombobulated, and no matter how gentlemanly – cry "Excretory substance!" or "Fornicate!" in the depths of his distress. (That said, I caution my writing students against coloring their prose with profanities like they were planting daisies, unless they had some clear and present reason to; one sure sign of sophomoric writing is a profusion of cuss words amid a poverty of plot and character. Cole Porter put it best exactly 70 years ago: "Good authors too who once knew better words / Now only use four-letter words / Writing prose / Anything goes!")
Of course, there are all kinds of nuances you could gain or lose either way, which is a good thing for those of us who make our living (bread, moolah, income, remuneration, monetary sustenance) from words. If everyone spoke so plainly, we professional scribes would be sitting on the sidewalk – beside a barrister or two – with begging bowl in hand.
Now, how did we ever get here? Actually, I don’t know.
It would have been interesting, though, to be in receipt of a bulldozer in my driveway, not that I would have known what do with it. If my yard were any larger it would have made for an unusual gazebo, its driver’s seat a perch from where I could have surveyed the neighborhood, elevated an extra foot by the awareness of all that power at my feet, at my command, ready to demolish my neighbors’ humble abodes with my oversized Tonka.
Oh, what fantasies these cell phones breed.