chips. Their guidance will help you move beyond ineffective flattery and brutal criticism
toward guidance that drives real growth and development. Be sure to add radical candor to your
podcast playlist to get new episodes every Wednesday. You'll be glad you did. And listen in on June
19th when I joined Kim and crew as their guest. When we think about the words we use, we tend to focus
on making sure we communicate our meaning. But in fact, communicating information about
our relationship, our connection might be even more important. I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach
strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, TalkSmart,
the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Valerie Friedland. Valerie is a professor of
Socialingistics at the University of Nevada in Reno. She's an expert on the relationship between
language and society and recently released her new book entitled Like Literally Dude,
Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Welcome Valerie, I am super excited to dive into our
conversation today. Well, thanks Matt. I'm really excited to talk with you. Great and I love it.
It's also my feelings about the message in my head. My feelings about our relationship
and my sense of how welcome this information might be to you. So all these different factors
enter into communication. So language is about how we encode both the linguistic message and
that social message. It really has two elements. The information in the connection as well. And we
have to be mindful of that for sure. I have like lots of detailed questions to ask. So let's get
into them. Can you talk about the power of the word like and the power of the words so? I see
these creeping in everywhere. Absolutely. And I think a lot of them are sort of as crutch words
or words that are not necessary. But really they're not at all the verbal rifereth that people
assign to them. They are really valuable and they both have a reason to serve a need. And everything
that we use in language comes in because it has a function that maybe some people don't value or
they have a different way of meeting that need. But then the speakers that bring in those innovations
clearly are finding a need for it. And like is a perfect example of that. Like has a bunch of
different purposes and historically has been in the language a long time. So we find verb like.
Obviously it was more like lease at the time. But that comes in around the 12th century into English.
And gradually over time by the time we hit the 15th and 16th century, all of a sudden like could be
a preposition and like could be a conjunction. That doesn't mean we always like the new forms of
those speech features. And even conjunction like is still thought of as being incorrect in grammar
books. So if you look at contemporary grammar books a lot of times they'll tell you do not use
like as a conjunction. Just sort of an example of how these forms shift over time. We often don't
like them when they're doing it. But the newest forms of like are ones that are not directly related to
the literal meaning of a sentence. And I think that's why people have a lot of problems with them.
But they have a lot of power in purpose. So you can use like as an approximator. So it tells you
I'm estimating something I'm giving you precise information on purpose. And that's when we use it
instead of about. So if I say he's like 12 years old. I could have said he's about 12 years old.
It's a one to one shift. No one is more meaningless than the other. But simply younger speakers prefer
to do it with like older speakers prefer about. So it's really just a generational divide in that case.
We also find it as a sentence particle. And that's where we just sort of put it in for some sort of
relational information that it's giving a listener. So it's telling a listener what I'm about to say
is connected in some way to what I just said. And that's usually when you say it sentence initially.
So you might say I don't think I'm going to go to that party like I'm too tired. And that's where I'm
saying I'm going to give you an example or a reason that's subjective that gives you more information
on what I just said. So it's connecting the two phrases. And the final use is something we call
quotitive verb, which is be like. So that's when you're using it instead of the verb to say to give
off the sense that it's not verbatim. The verb to say really implies this verbatimness to it. It's
not really what I'm thinking while this is happening. It's more what I was saying while this is
happening. But if I want to convey to you that I was thinking something when an event in the story
was happening, the verb to say doesn't allow that kind of subjectivity, but say I am like, I was
like, that allows that extra piece of information that this is my subjective interpretation of events.
This is my thought process. And it doesn't mislead someone into thinking it was a verbatim quote.
So that's it's power. It does these extra things that we don't have without that feature. In terms
of so, there are a couple different so's and several of them are new in our speech. One is the
sentence initial. So is that the one that you were thinking about? Yes, or is the transition. Yeah,
it's the same thing. Everybody's so okay. Like so I wonder what you're doing today. A lot I've
heard that about that one a lot. I get a lot of emails saying I hate the so that comes at the
beginning of the sentence. It's so funny that people in there I use this so it's there so is everywhere.
It's very funny that people dislike that one because there are so many different features we use
to connect sentences. So if I say something like, therefore thus, hereafter, no one says those are
crappy and don't use them. I might not have friends to go drink at the bar because those sound
a little bit weirdly formal, but they are connectors. And so is doing the same kind of work.
For some reason, people are particularly opposed to so. I think it's because it's become pretty
prevalent. But the so they're functions as something called backstory so. So what it does is it tells
somebody, I just said something or you just said something. And now I need to connect what I'm
going to say to what you said, but I can't jump directly in because there's a whole backstory.
You need to know before I get to telling you what you just asked me. And I think people don't like it
because sometimes it seems like you're going off topic because it's introducing this backstory.
But a lot of times it's because the speaker feels like that backstory is important to progressing
in the conversation. So it has a power and a purpose because it's introducing supplemental
material that otherwise would feel odd without some sort of indicator by a speaker of what its
purpose is. And that's how we all interpret that so. It is amazing to me how much work these very
tiny words do for us. And I appreciate you articulating just the way these words work. I mean,
there are almost like Swiss Army knives that can help us in so many different situations.
You brought up a point that I didn't realize was a pet peeve until I heard you speaking
at the beginning of phrases before people have even said anything. So I don't know what's up with
that. A lot of times people say them when you're in conversation. And so I mean as usually an
indicator that you're going to refine or provide some sort of additional information on something
or clarify something that was previously said. And it's often something that was either said
several turns ago that you said or it's something that someone asks about or someone makes a
comment about that you want to refine their understanding in terms of interpreting what you were
saying. So if someone will say, I mean, I didn't really think that, but I guess now that you say it,
it's true. Where it's sort of saying, okay, yes, I'm stepping back to further
explicate how what I'm saying relates to what you're saying. The you know is interesting because
it invites audience inference. That is the idea of you know. So when I say, well, I was doing this,
you know, and then this happened. What it's doing is it's involving the listener in a sort of
collective storytelling or collective conversation building. And that is why I say, you know, it's
because I want to involve the listener in some way in this collaborative process. But because it's
inviting listener inference, sometimes listeners don't interpret it positively because they feel like
you're asking them to do work. It's asking the listener to refine their thinking or to do extra work
in thinking when it's not their turn. And I think part of the reason that people dislike you know
is because they don't want to feel involved at that level in someone else's turn. So it's a
mismatch, I think, between my attempts to involve you as a listener in our conversation collaboratively
and your attempt to be sort of just a static listener and not have to get involved all the time.
It's definitely age driven. I find that discourse markers are tend to be used more by young women.
And some studies have supported that. And older men in particular find them
disfavorable, which can then hurt women in these professional contexts because that's
underlying lean evaluation that no one might be aware they're making. But they may feel like a
woman's being less certain or less sure or less authoritative because she's inviting
inferences from the audience. And we found though when we look at studies of who uses these,
it tends to be people that on psychological tests prove to be more conscientious. So it seems
to be women because historically they've been forced to be more the organizers, the conscientious ones
at the ones that manage conversation. And that makes them more useful to them.
You've really opened up my mind to these phrases that had been bothersome to me. And it strikes me
that you know and I mean are really helping one of the two functions of language, which is the
social emotional aspect of it. And in that research you shared is fascinating. And it certainly
highlights the point that the words we use and the way we use those words impact how people see us
in what they think about us. And part of the reason why I think what you study is so important
for everybody to really take time to understand is judgments are being made about how you are
using language. It's not just are you communicating your information well one of the purposes of
language. But the impact of that in terms of the social emotional relationship is really playing out.
In my world as somebody who focuses on spoken communication, filler words loom large, the
us and the ums, they can be very distracting, especially when repeated too often. Many people
are given the advice to get rid of these. I'm wondering what is the purpose of them because
they're ubiquitous. And do they help us in some way? And to your point you just made are there
differences in terms of gender, age, expertise when it comes to filler words?
Yes, that's a big question. So I'm going to unpack it in a bunch of different little little levels.
Let's first tackle the idea of filled pauses, which is what language refer to as um and uh,
which are slightly different than filler words more generally from a cognitive standpoint
and also from a function standpoint. So things like you know and like don't actually pattern
the same way as uh and um. So we when we think don't pattern the same way, we kind of separate
them. So filled pauses are things that seem to signal cognitive processing load. So they occur
mainly before we're doing really hard cognitive retrieval. So that means they're going to be more
likely before difficult words, more abstract words, less common syntactic structures. What I
mean by that is for example at the very beginning of a sentence they're going to occur more often
as we find in research because my brain has to build the entire structure of the sentence before
I get started. And so the um or the uh or signaling okay I'm really working hard here. So I think
it's interesting we hate them so much when actually they're signaling someone's doing really
hard work in that conversation. And people that choose very familiar words don't um and uh is
often because they're not doing such cognitive retrieval. Now that doesn't mean they're doing
dumb things. It simply means when I do these some I'm really working hard at coming up with things
are less familiar for me. The other thing is they have a communicative part. And so when I um or
uh not only does it signal I'm doing some hefty cognitive retrieval, but it also signals to a
listener that I need a break. I need a pause and I'm not done with my turn yet because we find
that when people are either giving lectures or telling stories or talking to computers all these
contexts where we're not expecting to be interrupted they um and uh less often which tells us
there's something intentional and communicative about using those and since we do it when we're in
conversation more often what that signals is I'm telling you back off buddy this is my turn and I
just need an eye tracking experiments or with ERP type brain scan measurements. What we find is it
increases their speed at word recognition and this one is the one that makes me really impressed.
It also seems to help them remember those words that were preceded by uh or um better than when
they weren't preceded by those in the tests that we get them later on. So the funny thing to me is how
much we despise um and uh how much we tell people to get rid of them when really there's nothing
from a linguistic standpoint that's not beneficial. However from a social standpoint
clearly they're not well loved and that means people might perceive you badly when you use them
but I think what we can do in terms of training ourselves if we're worried about our ums and us is
use the information that linguistics can give us to look at how we can be more effective speakers
from a social standpoint by taking what we know linguistically and applying it to our own practice.
So to do that we need to make things more familiar, make things less difficult and make
things less abstract because we know that the more we do that the better we will be in terms of
lowering our rate of um and uh. So the more I practice and the more I'm prepared and familiar with
my material the less likely I am in those contexts to use um and uh because the whole point is I
won't need to be doing as much cognitive activation. And so there are ways that we can use this
linguistic knowledge to help us with our social knowledge as well. There are so many things that
um and uh seem to do to really help us. I learned so much from you in that answer. The fact that
it signals cognitive processing which means we're doing good work on behalf of our audience and yet
the fact that as audiences we might see the um and uh in a very different light the person's nervous
isn't prepared etc is fascinating. I'd love for you to talk to me about how we end our sentences
in terms of vocal quality. Some of us go up at the end of our sentences to make them sound like
questions even though they're not. In others of us can get really quiet or even what's known as
this vocal fry where you get really gravely at the end of sentences. Does this sort of purpose at
all and is it troublesome in terms of language and language use? I think it's only troublesome to
those that really dislike it and to the people that are affected by those who dislike it. Uh
uptalk and vocal fry are both things that have been strongly associated with women's voices in
contemporary American culture and this can be really problematic for women because women tend to be
innovators. They generally lead in language change and women's voices also historically are not
welcomed in many public or um so when you take voices that are inherently biased against anyway
and then you make them innovators and you do noticeable things like invent new forms and
fashions in speech. It doesn't usually go well for you and that seems to be what's happening with
both uptalk and vocal fry. Both of those are ways to signal social meaning and usually they signal
something about either you want to make sure people know you're going to continue your turn. So
uptalk in the way that you're talking about where it's not actually a rising international
question but it's rising intonation on a statement that has been used primarily to
signal continuation of a speech stream and so women might be using this more often because often
they are talked over. So if we look at research particularly in public domains like professional
or educational settings even though there's a strong belief women talk more in those settings
they generally do not and in fact often don't speak up because they're not treated very well when
they do they don't feel like their voices are welcome and so it has made them maybe be a little more
clear that they're not done with their speaking term because in those contexts we do find women
that tend to get interrupted more often. There was a really interesting study of Supreme Court
Justices where they found in oral arguments female Supreme Court Justices get interrupted at a
much higher rate than male Supreme Court Justices both by men and women it wasn't just men doing it
it was both groups just seemed to interrupt women more. So one solution is to rise your intonational
pattern to make sure people are not misreading your turn is being done. So that's a really effective
strategy. It's not troublesome in the way that it's actually a very ingenious way to try to get
the turn but it's troublesome in that people tend to really strongly associate this upward intonation
pattern with question formation and because even though they know you're not doing a question
because they're very strongly tied to these norms of what they think speech should be used for
an intonational pattern being one way or another they often call attention to it. The other one
you talked about was Vocal Fry which is sort of the opposite pattern where you drop in pitch
that seems to signal I'm getting to the end of my Senate so that's a totally different cue so
instead of signaling continuation it's signaling I'm done with my thought and it does also seem to be
something prevalent in women's speech in the United States but interestingly if you look at the
studies on vote in fact even in smartphone data that was cold and studied in 2021 to look at the
distribution of Vocal Fry in British speech again it was strongly a male tendency not a female
tendency but what it has really prompted it to use here is again the need for women to adjust
their voice to be taken seriously and we find a correlation with Vocal Fry and ratings of
professionalism or vanity and sort of intimacy and relaxed tone and that seems to be what's
driving young women to use it these days in American speech to get that sort of professional
boost and that competence and leadership boost that is associated with low pitch and men's voices.
Again both of these are signaling social cues to help people understand how to relate.
You've certainly underscored the power and status transfer of information that comes through
the language we use the words we use but also the way in which we say it. I'd like to switch gears
here and get to two questions that are rather personal in nature. Several years ago in my strategic
communication class at the business school I asked if emojis were appropriate in business
communication and again several years ago I'd say the results were about 50-50 from my students
and just recently knowing I was going to be speaking with you I asked exactly the same question
and the result was dramatically different. Virtually everybody said that emojis are appropriate
in business communication as a linguist what do you think of emojis are they appropriate in our
communication are they serving a purpose and function that words aren't doing for us.
I think they absolutely are there have been some studies in the early 2000s on texting speech or
computer mediated communication and they looked at things like emojis and they found that they
were actually quite rare at that time they were only about 4% of our communications in that forum
but I think you're right that in the last 15 years or so it has grown exponentially how much we
use those kinds of metamessaging in our texts and our emails and I think that's because there has
been such an explosion especially with the pandemic but even before that with our forms of communication
in the workplace we have gone from communicating over the phone and face-to-face to communicating
primarily over email and text. I have two teenagers and I don't think they even know how to use a
phone. I'm not kidding. My younger son yelled at me for calling him on the phone. I'm like that's
what it's for is like no no no no this is a texting device. Exactly so it has shifted so dramatically
how much we use these different kinds of techniques of getting in touch but what the problem is when
you're not face-to-face is the communication of all these social messages that we give when we
talk on the phone or we talk face-to-face are not available to us and things can be misconstrued so
if you say what are you doing well when we're in person I might say what are you doing well that's
clear for my intonation that you're doing something wrong but if I say hey what you're doing that's
clear from my tone of voice that I'm just like what's going on let's hang out so very very different
thing email that kind of social messaging isn't available to you but what is are these other new
forms of transmitting these emotional and social messages and emojis are huge in that and they're
more effective in many ways than some of the things like exclamation points in all caps
because there's so many different forms of them that you can convey all sorts of emotions so
irony laughter love all of those things are available and accessible now I I don't think I would
suggest sending your boss a heart emoji is maybe the right choice but certainly I think if you
say something and you want it to be taken time in cheek or as I don't want to be confrontational
here I'm trying to just convey information like I need that report by five I'm not yelling at you
I'm just requesting and there's no way to indicate that unless you use additional information so
I might yell at you by writing all caps but if I'm just conveying that I need that report by five
and hey we're cool a smiley face can do a lot of that kind of work for us so I absolutely think
it's fine but I also think this is a case where you need to know your audience and if you know that
you have a you know curmudgeon as a boss that probably has never used an emoji to careful in your
wording not to come across as to direct or as somewhat rude which I think email often can be a
forum where that can happen easily I predict that if you and I were to have this conversation five
10 years from now that sending your boss a heart emoji might be acceptable it is changing so
quickly and so fast that evolution is going to happen I'm convinced I do agree that the subtle
cues that you can put in through emojis are really helpful and can help reduce friction and
misunderstanding now this question is incredibly ungrammatical name of this podcast think fast talk
smart do we get a failing grade in from a linguist oh no you definitely give me a plus
well first of all it's really not ungrammatical so if we were outside in Tahoe in 20 feet of snow
and I threw a snowball at you and I said think fast it would be completely appropriate so it's not
really ungrammatical if you situationally place it but what I love is how you're using one of the
first lessons of marketing and branding which is make yourself memorable and if we are all saying
the same thing then saying something different makes us stand out and so it's a very effective way
to make a name or a title be different stand out have more marketing and branding value because
it's more memorable when it's not just the same old same old and by doing something slightly
atypical you are making people notice it more so I love the name well thank you for that so
Valerie before we end I would love to ask you the same three questions that I ask everybody and
I'm going to be very curious about the words you choose because I know words are so important to
you if you were to capture the best communication advice you ever received as a five to seven
word presentation slide title what would it be sometimes listening is more important than speaking
okay that was some great advice I got when I first became an academic I joined my department as
a tenure track professor and as anybody who's in a university knows tenure is one of those things
where everybody who votes on you is your colleague so you have to be very diplomatic and very
cheerful and I asked a mentor I had what her advice was for how I should approach conversations
with my colleagues participation in departmental meetings and meaning but for the use of words and
how it plays out question number two who is a communicator that you admire and why now this is
a tough one because I'm torn between ones that I you know historically have had a lot of
respect for and ones that I think are great communicators in the modern era in ways that people
would not expect so am I allowed to I'll give you two I'm very curious now you've teased me okay so
I think if I was just going to say who's a great orator and who I feel has a wonderful cadence and
an emotional resonance in the way he talks that has been appealing to many many people I'd say
Martin she's also very eloquent but she's also using the norms and the functions in the feature
all second to respond kindly and compassionately and third to relax everything you're worried about
in speech of people that may not talk like you will work itself out and it'll be become our new
norms or they'll be on the wayside and it's not going to cause the decay of English so I think
relax would be my third outward in that case and I think that is really important advice you know
I do a lot of work and I'm sure you do as well with non native speakers in our case to English
and there's a lot of stress to say it right you know whatever that right is and to relax and
understand language and that it will change over time is really important well Valerie thank you
so much I have to admit that speaking to a linguist I was very worried about my word choice
and you made it very comfortable and natural to speak with you and we learned a lot about
not just the purpose of language in terms of transmission of meaning but of transmitting
connection and social relationships and how all of these things came to be thank you so much
absolutely thank you for having me on thanks for joining us for another episode of Think Fast
Talk This Episode was produced by Jenny Luna Ryan Campos and me Matt Abrahams our music was provided
by Floyd Wanderer for more information and episodes find us on YouTube or wherever you get your
podcasts thank you and please make sure to subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn
Hi Matt here for most of us present English language learning web page at fastersmarter.io slash
ELL this page is designed to help all non native English speakers feel less anxious while being
more authentic and successful in their communication in addition to practical advice you will find
Think Fast Talk Smart episode specific ELL content along with links to my favorite English language
learning podcast playlist please check out fastersmarter.io slash ELL
