[ExI] You know what?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wednesday 23 January 2008, spike wrote:
> Another good example is like.  Like isn't new; teenagers said like a
> lot when we were their age.  Notice that like is always followed by,
> and often preceeded by a pause.  This is used as thinking time.  Take
> a spoken sentence with the filler like, take out the pauses before
> and after, then repeat the sentence.  Now it scarcely makes sense, or
> rather the term like takes on a different meaning, and changes the
> meaning of the sentence.  {8^D Try it.

Yep. When Lee first brought up the issue I was inclined to point out 
that these phrases (at least for myself) seem to change over time. I 
hypothesize that we have a limited number of cached phrases in our 
short term memory for any given interval, and therefore they have to 
cycle through so that we have more time to go cachehunting into the 
deep, dark depths of LTM.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/