Speaking clearly, or not so much

So the other night I watched this movie called "Feel The Noise." (I thought there would be more fun dancing involved, but instead there was all this stuff about sampling Puerto Rican frog noises into reggaeton music, and how The Man wanted to take out all the flava from the music and then sleep with the main character's girlfriend, causing her to kick him in the cojones and run away and sleep on a park bench, yet wake up the next morning looking strangely fresh-faced and conveniently right along the route of the Puerto Rico Day parade so she could reconcile with her boyfriend before his Very Important Performance.  But that's not really here nor there.)

Anyway, the main character had this annoying habit of using the filler, "You know what I'm sayin'?" in between all the rest of his lines.  Except it sounded like, "Younoamsan'?"  I get that a lot of people really do talk like this, and I get that it was supposed to lend authenticity to his role and all, but you know what, movie character?  I don't know what you're sayin', because you're not really sayin' anything since in between everything you're actually sayin', you keep sayin' "you know what I'm sayin'?"   

I find this to be one of the strangest filled pauses... I get "um" and "uh" and "well" and even "you know," but really, "You know what I'm sayin'?"  If the filler is so long you have to trim it down unto something completely unintelligible, that kind of defeats the purpose of a filled pause in the first place, which is basically to buy you time while you think of what to say next.  I'd be thinking about making my filler sound right instead of thinking about my next point, and then I would need to employ a new filler while I remembered what I was trying to say in the first place.  You know what I'm sayin'?  

Comments

[Yarn Droid]

Hi, it's Yarndroid from DC (no, the OTHER DC) and I'm checking in here because I used to work with a guy who was CONSTANTLY filling his FREQUENT pauses with "Nomzen" which it took me FOREVER to figure out was his version of "Know what I'm sayin'?". He also greeted everyone in the morning with "Squeenon?" which translates to "What's going on?" Grr.