JS

“You know” (verbal whitespace)

When I started doing debate in high school, I had the same problem most people have when speaking under more stressed conditions. Most recognizable as the dreaded “um”s or “uh”s peppered throughout a prepared speech, or even the “like”s that some people seem to utter like every other…like word.

For me, it surfaced most in less formal events where I had to largely think and talk on my feet in an impromptu fashion. Whenever I needed a moment to finish forming a thought, instead of taking a breath to pause, my lips kept reflexively forming the words “(and/or) you know” and I wouldn’t even notice. Reviewing performance tapes I’d cringe every time I heard it. Sometime it’d even spawn into a valley girl instance of “you know like…”

A friend recently pointed out to me that I say “있잖아” a lot when speaking in Korean. It essentially means the same thing as “you know” and while I learned to fix it for debate, now I find myself paranoid about saying “있잖아” whenever I use Korean!

It’s funny in both cases because it’s an instance of knowing something but not being able to get it out in words other than to essentially say, “You know, that thing here in my head that you obviously can’t see but I wish you could.”

Usually it’s just an instinctive reflex to cover a break in my train of thought (the verbal equivalent of fearing whitespace I suppose), so the body of what I’m saying still makes perfect sense if one simply omits the unnecessary phrase. What’s infinitely worse when people, especially teachers, repeatedly say “you know” actually expecting one to know. The listener ends up absolutely knowing nothing about what the speaker said.