Verbal Tics Are Kinda Annoying

One of the regular speakers inserts that phrase, most often in its elided colloquial form “kinda,” into nearly every sentence. Qualifying an idea is a sign of a thoughtful speaker; but not almost every idea. Sometimes two or three “kindas” even manage to make it into the same sentence. The discussions’ content remains stellar, but the peccadillos are jarring. It’s analogous to a three-star Michelin restaurant with visibly dirty carpets. I have trouble focusing on the proverbial chateaubriand.

I am the first to acknowledge the insidious nature of verbal tics—the ums, wells, likes, you knows, I means, sort ofs, yadda yadda—that clutter our speech. I myself am a recovering “you know” offender. Most verbal crutches are what I call “stallers,” phrases that give our slow-footed brains time to catch up with our runaway mouths. We’re all susceptible to this, especially anyone who does public speaking. That’s why these verbal viruses are prevalent, but that makes them all the more annoying.

Years ago, I worked on musical productions with a talented director prone to two irritating stallers. His preferred crutch was “Do you know what I’m sayin’?” Perhaps unconsciously practicing the rhetorical art of variation, he’d occasionally resort to his backup, “Does that make sense to you?” Of course, as a native speaker of English, I did know what he was saying, but I always bit my tongue when I was tempted to give a sarcastic reply. During our three-year collaboration we worked harmoniously, eased along by my frequent assurances that, yes, that made sense to me.

But there is great value in working to leave “kinda” and its kin behind. I know from when my friend Todd Hunt—Ogilvy advertising executive turned motivational speaker—cured me of my “you know” habit years ago. He styles himself a “business humorist” whose expertise is the art of communication and how to improve it. As he observes in the opening of one of his entertaining talks, “We begin communicating the day we are born and we don’t stop until the day we get married.”

Todd taught me that to be a better speaker, you must be a better listener—first of all to yourself. If we want to lose those verbal tics and crutches that plague us, we must vigilantly monitor our speech. Kinda all the time. You know what I’m sayin’?

Mr. Opelka is a musical-theater composer-lyricist.