How Do Filler Words Benefit Us?

pepper (one’s) conversation: 대화 중간중간에 섞이다
And some of the most frequent targets of this communication regulation are the ums, ers, and likes that pepper our conversations.

disfluency: 눌변, 말더듬
Historically, these speech components had been lumped into the broader bucket of disfluencies…

imbue: 스며들다, 물들이다
…and expectations of where a conversation will go can imbue even words that seem like filler with vital information.

buy time: 시간을 벌다
fish out: 찾아내다
Hesitation phenomena can buy time for your speech to catch up with your thoughts, or to fish out the right word for a situation.

literal meaning: 문자 그대로의 뜻
…ignoring their literal meaning to convey something about the sentence in which they appear.