Liquid Samurai: 'FORMLESS AND INFINITE ARE WE, THE LIQUID SAMURAI. I SERVE MY QUEEN, AS WE HAVE FOR COUNTLESS--' / Mona: 'HEY, I DON'T MEAN TO INTERRUPT, BUT YOU SEEM LIKE YOU'RE MADE OF POWERFUL STUFF. CAN I, ER, STUDY YOU?' 2019 December 10, Yacht Club Games, "Story" (Mona), in Shovel Knight Showdown (version 4.1), Nintendo Switch
As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er. 2007 August 24, William Grimes, “Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 04 Jan 2013:
If he—er—disappears—well, it seems to me that we'd both benefit. 2012, Linda Miller, Desire and Destiny:
“Er...Feathered Omen, hoot not,” he continued uneasily, “Son of Tanit, hoot not!” 1970, Richard Carpenter, Catweazle, Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, page 11:
Although Shakespeare refers to “hums and ha’s,” sifting through etiquette manuals and public-speaking guides turns up scant evidence of a prohibition against ums, ers and uhs, which are profuse in the first recording of Thomas Edison’s voice, in 1888. Mr. Erard, rather ingeniously, traces the prohibition on um and other speech flaws to the advent of radio in the early 1920s. 2007 August 24, William Grimes, “Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 04 Jan 2013: