Am I, er, unreasonable to be, er, irritated by, er, this

I blame Tony Blair and all the pauses he used to insert before totally unimportant words!

If they're not in acting mode, they have difficulty in stringing a sentence together.

Once you pick up on it, it's so distracting.
I find myself counting them.

I can forgive Robert Peston and others who used to have a stammer and has overcome it but otherwise grrrrrrrr

when I say forgive I expect to be jumped on but I had a good friend who had a terrible stammer and he never let it stop him from doing what he wanted to do.
(Good on you, Nick. )

Haha. For me it’s the mumbling. So much mumbling! My hearing is perfect, I’m only 55, but I have to have subtitles on anything made after about 2010 due to the mumbling. My children laugh at me because I consistently scream “Enunciate for goodness sake boy” at the TV

Annoys the heck out of me too . h
I did not realise that Robert Peston had/has a stammer . Probably explains why he has a slight delay in his speech at times.
I have hearing problems and some programmes I just cannot hear at all . Never thought to use subtitles though !

Oh the mumbling gets me too!! A presenter on local radio last week was listing the people appearing at an event later this year. I spent part of the day thinking a group named Grey Stones was appearing - seems she was really saying Grace Jones!!

Anyone remember Bill Shankly and his long drawn out "eerrr" s, several in every sentence?

If it isn’t ‘err’ it will be ‘um’. Drives me potty!

No, you are not unreasonable in objecting to err and um in sentences, or to people mumbling.

I suppose Tony Blair may have caused some people to think, "Well if he can see err all the time, I can too", but I can clearly remember being corrected at school in 1964 or thereabouts for say "err"

Not as annoying to me as 'like' in every sentence!

Yes that's annoying too HumptyDumpty along with "at the end of the day" and
"I'm not being funny but...." grrrrr

My nephew drives me crazy with every 3rd word being "like". Do children pick up this bad habit at school? Admittedly it is a long time since my nephew was at school because he is in his early 30's now.

For every drama that is on, I now have subtitles.

“To err is human, to forgive divine.” Pope

Linguistic fillers!

They actually have a very important role in speech and verbal discourse.

This is a nice starting place for an article, but most of the linguistics stuff is fairly comprehensible to laypeople if you are interesting in investigating this more.

www.nimdzi.com/exploring-linguistic-fillers/

I find a lot of people can not string a sentence together without an auto que,even then they have a problem sometimes.

On Saturday I travelled for three hours on a train to Southampton seated behind a very self-possessed young woman who talked incessantly about herself in a cut glass accent, with ear-splitting clarity, but with 'like' interjected every five or six words ( I counted.) Clearly this has replaced OK yah.
" Like they asked me at the interview, like, had I got a hobby? A hobby, like! I have an extremely demanding job and like I am buying a house and like, do it up so I can make a profit. I don't have time, like, for a hobby."
Recognise yourself, Sophie? Like!!!

What about basically then, its basically this and basically that, the most overused word I have ever heard! Basically it cheeses me off.

For some irrational reason I get irked by the overuse of the word 'absolutely'.
It may be me but so many people in interviews preface a sentence with it.Once I have heard it several times I'm willing them to choose a different word.Also agree with a dislike for the word 'Like'.

Maybe everyone should be enrolled on 'Just a Minute' where you have to speak on a given subject without repetition, deviation or hesitation!!

anja ??

great post Gill

‘Literally’ is another one as in “I got such a fright I literally felt my heart stop.” No, you didn’t!!