[nonrandomstring]

Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of "particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"), TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for speech as more than just words.

I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood, excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven into their speech.

[internet_points]

(The article is satire. Particles are an ill-defined class, they may have "meaning" or change the meaning of something, like "up" in "look up!", or they may say something about the speaker's attitude towards the statement or they may be required syntactically e.g. when posing a question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle#Modern_me... )