sort of....the eloquent man's umm

At post number 3, this blog is still finding itself. At the risk of typecasting myself into the role of the grammar police, today's entry returns to this blog's roots of criticizing general abuse of the English language. Today I will examine the increase in use of the term "sort of". I was first introduced to this term in 2002, when a business venture took me to the UK for several months, and I found it there to be in common use. Women everywhere wearing fuzzy pink pajamas outside of their homes (a trend which made its way to the US several years later) were using "sort of" to allow their brains to catch up to their mouths during normal conversation.

Because of the deep-seated admiration of the English culture in America, and our idea that a person speaking with an English accent is to be believed (ref Supernanny or Mr. Belvedere), the term "sort of" migrated to the upper echelon of US speakers. Scientists, politicians, commentators, and the like can now be heard on various media overusing this term themselves.

Just the other day I was listening to a woman on NPR describing the life of Henrietta Lacks, whose Hela cells have allowed the medical community to make great strides in cancer research. It was a subject that I found thoroughly interesting, but the speaker's overuse of the term "sort of" made her interview all but unlistenable. It was as if in the course of each sentence, the woman would enter a very brief vegetative state; her voice and demeanor would change entirely as she delivered the dreaded "sort of" again and again. I could just imagine her eyes glazing over and a pock of drool forming at the corner of her mouth with each utterance, followed by a quick shake of the head before returning to the normal cadence of the interview. I didn't go so far as to keep tally, but I would venture to guess that I heard those awful words at least 50 times in a 10 minute interview (10 * 60 / 50 = once every 12 seconds).

I miss umm; there was something more honest about it.