A recent Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle had as its theme, "Roughly Speaking," which played out in answers of words containing either "er" or "um." When spoken, those two sounds are known as "fillers" or "unwords," because they have no meaning. Unwords are the bane of any speaker's existence because they produce a perception of uncertainty.
Barack Obama, whose superior speaking skills undoubtedly contributed to his ascent to the presidency, is known to lapse into unwords whenever he departs from his trusty teleprompter and speaks extemporaneously--as in a press conference. This lapse has drawn much spoofing, much of it in "slice and dice" videos, in which video editors extract Obama's unwords from a press conference and string them together into a tight montage. David Letterman, whose show has a running feature of satirical videos about presidents, most of them targeting George W. Bush, did his own mash-up of Obama's unwords.
Obama's unwords have also drawn a great deal of commentary. I wrote about the subject in an earlier blog and in a chapter about Obama in The Power Presenter. The chapter was excerpted in an article in BOTTOM LINE/Personal, but because the excerpt focused on his strengths, it omitted my discussion of his unwords. This prompted an angry email criticizing the omission, saying, "To prove my point on Obama ... using fillers to ad nauseam, try counting them in minute intervals. I've done this on numerous occasions when he's 'unscripted' and the fillers come in around 17 per minute. In fact, with a yes or no question, our president took 4 minutes to answer, and used 51 fillers."
My critic concluded, "The ONLY time the president does NOT use 'ummm' or 'ahhh,' and please allow me to add the word 'and,' is when he is reading the teleprompter. This is why he uses this aid all the time. This man needs to be scripted, and if not, he's awful."
I agree with my critic about the negative effect of unwords, and so does the Times crossword puzzle--unwords are indeed rough speaking--but there is an opposite point of view. An article in London's Daily Telegraph described an academic study in Scotland:
Experts at Stirling and Edinburgh universities asked volunteers to listen to a series of sentences, including a number punctuated by "ers" and "ahs".
Then they tested how much the listeners could remember, and found that inserting the "ers" had a significant positive effect on how well the subjects recalled what they had heard.
Up to an hour after hearing typical sentences, volunteers got 62 per cent of words correct where there had been an "er" in the sentence.
That compared with 55 per cent for similar utterances where there had not been any stumbles. The tests have since been replicated twice and the results are said to be "statistically significant".Perhaps something was lost in translation coming across the Atlantic, but after twenty years of observing and coaching thousands of presentations, I can tell you with absolute certainty that unwords undercut any presenter's effectiveness, including that of the current President of the United States and his far more often than not charismatic speaking style.
He could eliminate his unwords very easily--without resorting to a teleprompter or even surgery. Yes he can.
Just call me.