Speech disfluencies are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or containing formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh or er, but also extending to repairs ("He was wearing bla—uh, blue pants"), and articulation problems such as stuttering. Use is normally looked down upon in mass media such as news reports or films, but they occur regularly in everyday conversation. Stuttering is a speech disorder in which pronunciation of the (usually) first letter or syllable of a word is repeated involuntarily. ... Mass media is the term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ... News is the reporting of current events usually by local, regional or mass media in the form of newspapers, television and radio programs, or sites on the World Wide Web. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed Film — also called movies, the cinema, the silver screen, moving pictures, photoplays, picture shows, flicks, or motion pictures, — is a field that encompasses motion pictures as an art form or as part of the entertainment industry. ...

Americans use pauses such as "um" or "uh," the British say "er," the French use something like "euh," Japanese use "ahh", and Hebrew and Spanish speakers use something like "ehhh." Other languages have their own syllables for these pauses. The United States of America — also referred to as the United States, the U.S.A., the U.S., America, the States, or (archaically) Columbia—is a federal republic of 50 states located primarily in central North America (with the exception of two states: Alaska and Hawaii). ... The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a country in western Europe, and member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the G8, the European Union, and NATO. Usually known simply as the United Kingdom, the UK, or (inaccurately) as Great Britain or Britain, the UK has four constituent... The French Republic or France (French: République française or France) is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents. ... The Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. ... The Modern Hebrew language is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. ... This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ...

Recent linguistic research has suggested that non-pathological disfluencies may contain a variety of meaning; the frequency of "uh" and "um" in English is often reflective of a speaker's alertness or emotional state. Some have hypothesized that the time of an "uh" or "um" is used for the planning of future words; other researchers have suggested that they are actually to be understood as full-fledged words rather than accidents, indicating a delay yet to come. There is some debate as to whether to consider them a form of white noise or as a meaning-filled part of language. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... This article is about white noise as a scientific concept, see also: White Noise (novel), a 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. ... As with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition. ...

Speech disfluencies have also become important in recent years with the advent of text-to-speech programs and other attempts at enabling computers to make sense of human speech. Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. ... The tower of a personal computer (specifically a Power Mac G5). ...

In America, since the 1980s, the word "like" has been used in the same way as "um" or "uh" as filler words, and is widespread among youth. For example, "I, like, don't know" instead of "I, uh, don't know" (see Like#Valley speak and beatniks for more information). Some people increasingly use both "like" and "um" to the point where they put them together, for example, "like, um... I don't know." Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... The word like has various uses:- Word history As preposition or adjective, it comes from the Middle English like meaning similar, which in turn comes from Anglo-Saxon gelīc and Old Norse líkr. ...

References

• Michael Erard, "Just Like, Er, Words, Not, Um, Throwaways," New York Times, January 3, 2004.