Spoken fluency

About four or five months ago, I was walking through the Berkeley campus one night, on my way back to my friend's apartment. In front of me walked two professionally dressed guys in a heated discussion. They were probably both either seniors or graduate students, as they looked to be in their early twenties. Alright, I'll admit I eavesdropped a little, but only because they were loud, and my ears would've caught their conversation involuntarily either way. And I was, well, surprised. Surprised to hear how intellectual their casual conversion was, and surprised how many times I heard the word "like" in the few minutes they were in front of me. I was in high school at the time, and "like" was an integral part of the daily vernacular, but I definitely didn't imagine it frequenting college campuses then.
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"Like" seems to be the teenage version of "um" or "uh," what Ted Landphair in his article "Spoken Language Is, um, Difficult" would agree to be speech disfluencies. The article, in fact, presents Texan journalist Michael Erard's take on our daily "spoken blunders," which he categorizes either under "slips of the tounge" or "speech disfluencies" in his book Um...: Slips, Stumbles, Verbal Blunders and What They Mean.

Speech disfluencies, as defined by wikipedia, are "any of various breaks, irregularities, or utterances that are often not consistent with any specific grammatical construction and occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech." They are "among the characteristics distinguishing spontaneous speech from planned or read speech"--our way of covering up the gap whenever we could not find the right word fast enough in spoken conversation. The three most common types of disfluencies are:

• Filled pauses: and the use of pause fillers such as "uh" or "um"
• She will, uh, celebrate it tomorrow.
  
• I need to, um, find it first

• Repetitions: of words or phrases
• Did you, did you see her?

• Deletions: or "repaired utterances"
• He doesn't, didn't want to go.
  

[Source: Disfluency types]

The person I admired most during high school, now that I think about it, was the eloquent friend who never needed the aid of disfluencies when composing her oral sentences. All of us, I think, admire or strive for eloquence as human beings. As Erard reminds us, however, "only a rare and unusually brilliant person--such as the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill--can speak without a hesitation or flub." The rest of us will speak in disfluencies as we search our brains to find and analyze words. Disfluencies therefore do not imply stupidity in any way. With some conscious effort, relative eloquence is acquirable, however. If you simply slow down while you speak, and pause to gather your thoughts instead of blindly pressing on in disfluencies, you could soon find yourself sounding as knowledgeable and assured as you know you are. (And if only I could follow my own advice...)