“Um” is not a word. So I remember one of my English teachers insisting decades gone, and I took her assertion to organ of circulation. Now, with the Internet, “um” has become a written word. It spreads, and it grates without interruption the ear.
Consider these examples from the past brace months:
This is not the nuncupative “um” that academics outcry a “filled pause” or “speech disfluency.” That’s the one my English teacher condemned for example a verbalized grope. The reinvigorated “um” is not a fumble. It is calculated.
David Shields, author and professor of English at the University of Washington, says this “um” is “an attempt to self-ironize, lightly mock, deflate, the sort of comes next. It’s like putting the next phrase into three periods repeated quotation marks. Shields says he likes it and uses it.
As Shields says, you can use “um” to mock yourself, but the profit comes in its practice to mock the other guy:
Here “um” property, “I’m pretending to contemplate your idea for a undivided, drawn out second, in this way I can insinuate, without stating any reasons, that it’session a stupid idea, so stupid that it’s ridiculous even to consider it.” So writes Stephen Cox, author and professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, who finds this use “grossly offensive.” What offends him is how it substitutes relation for argument.
This, I think, is the essence of it. One blogger calls this use of “um” the “false-modesty indirection attack.” Another calls it “coy, pretending to be needy goal actually make a jab.” Another writes that it the wherewithal, “What you’re saying is so stupid I can’t be persuaded I extremity to make plain it to you.”
I think of it as a snide attack.
I first noticed the “um” attack at HA Seattle, the lefty Internet blog. Its proprietor, David Goldstein, has made a trademark of blunt view, and may exist Seattle’s pioneer public user of “um.” The no-salt quotation above is his, from Dec. 24. Here are some earlier uses, in headlines:
… (2004);
(2005);
(a week ago Tuesday, in a file about human being of this boy-servant’s editorials).
“Um” is also used at thestranger.com:
(2005).
At Seattle.metblogs.com:
(2007).
And upon this page, in David Sirota’s column Monday, about whether Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the Depression
This is a way of saying, “I’m so right I don’t have to consider your dispute.”
Clearly, the sneering use of “um” has been around awhile, but I don’t abjure it before this decade. It is an Internet word, welcomed where writing is like speech and is spiced with acronyms and emoticons. I learned to write in a pre-Internet century, and to me it is a barbarian thing, the grunted equivalent of a sitcom cachinnation footstep.
Editors at the Web site Television Without Pity seem to think so, too. They have gone so far as to ban it. “Nine times out of ten,” the site says, the use of “um” or “uh” begins “a snivelly correction directed at another poster. It’s rude and dismissive and it drives the staff nuts, so please, don’t do it.”
And yet there is always a market for snark. If the mocking use of “um” passes through the Hula-hoop stage, and it may be in actual possession of done in the same state already, it volition become a recognized English word. It will worm its way into the dictionaries and, by and by, even the teachers of English will affirm it good.
; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008596878_opin07rams.html?syndication=rss
