Kind of Sort of Filling Time

I wonder if you have noticed this trend. Two new "filler" phrases have crept into conversation, and they are slowly taking over, like a dandelion patch expands into a lawn while a homeowner is on vacation.

These phrases are "kind of" and "sort of." Listen for them. On the radio, they invade interviews. During your phone conversations, they leap over the wires and into your ear, only to infect your brain so that you begin saying them, sort of a "yellow fever" of trendy phraseology. They kind of invade your speech, but sort of without notice, like ninjas slinking around Halloween pool party at night. Listen for them the next time you watch the Sunday morning talk shows. Be on alert for them when you turn on talk radio. They're kind of the new "like," that valley girl infection that caught on in the Eighties and sort of ruled the world for a while. They even appear in print, a kind of "new age" filler.

These catch phrases work to soften a statement, a sort of equivocation that fits with our relativistic world, where political correctness pervades to kind of make everything less than absolute.

Listen for them. You will hear them everywhere. But please do not repeat them. They sort of get into your head, a kind of "brain worm" that feeds off of you, the host, until your thoughts and words become mush.