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Ill-advised I sat in a training session this morning watching a woman in the front row marking down every time one of the presenters said "um". It made me very angry and I wanted her to see my angry glare, but she never turned around to look at me. It made me angry because it's rude and the presenters could have easily seen what she was doing (although I don't think they did). How smug and self-righteous. Public speaking isn't easy and you might think that you'd be able to give a perfect and perfectly eloquent presentation, but fuck you you probably wouldn't. But it also made me angry as a linguist. Conflictedly angry, which made me doubly angry. Angry because this woman seems to think that "um" is a failure of some sort, not recognizing that there can be cognitive and discourse reasons for using "um". And conflicted because as a linguist I shouldn't get angry about people having opinions about language and usage. I should be a cool academic about it, and I should pity them for their inferior knowledge. People have very strong opinions about language, including me, but I think I'm all high and mighty because of my training. But I'm not any better than anyone else, I'm one of them. For example, I should recognize that when people misuse "whom" they're not misusing it, they're using it. It is prescriptive of me to say that you shouldn't use "whom" but, if you must, at least don't misuse it. But I'm not level-headed about it, or impartial, and I will continue to bloviate about it. Don't fucking use "whom", for fucks sake! But if you must use it, at least use it correctly! If you don't know when to use it, don't use it! You sound ultra-smart only to idiots! And anyway a few months ago I myself was listening to a training session making note of when the speaker said "You know" but it was because you know she put you know it you know in very you know unexpected you know places and I you know was imagining that you know I was you know doing a you know discourse you know study of you know, you know where she used you know it. I am such a snot! But that's normal, right? My study was inconclusive; she used it all over the place. Like seriously, no discernable pattern. I cannot guarantee that at the next talk of hers I go to I will not gather further data for study. God, I should delete this whole thing. I am going to turn one (or more) of the pepper plants into a bonsai pepper plant! Aww shit yeah, dog!
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