A few years ago my friend Kristen and I started a podcast called “The Exotic Fruit Review”. We tasted exotic fruits there, talked about it and interviewed people who lead extraordinary lives. While we loved having an original podcast, Kristen and I had to do all of the planning, production, and editing work ourselves.

One of the things that really made me fight was the editing of our episodes. Although the content was interesting and even slightly entertaining, I hated listening to the sound of my own voice.

I started to notice a verbal pattern where my voice was ahead of my brain. While I was thinking of the right words to say, I filled in the silent voids with a steady cadence of “uhs” and “ums”.

While Kristen and I loved trying the exotic fruits, including durian and mamey sapote, the production record (as well as the parenthood of our respective children) caught up with us and we stopped production indefinitely.

There is a term for the filler words and sounds we pronounce when navigating to the right word or the right thought: “embolalia” (or “embololism”). It comes from the Greek compound word “embolos”, a combination of “packed” (to throw) and “lalia” (forming a language with abnormal or disorderly speech).

Other terms to describe this type of speech include “forms of hesitation”, “automatic speech” and “formulated language”.

Before you recognize this pattern in yourself and think that you have some sort of disturbing disorder, know that almost everyone includes some form of embolalia in their speech, whether they realize it or not. Embolalia encompasses all filler words including “like”, “sort of”, “you know” and “I mean”, as well as non-words including “uh”, “uh”, “uh “And” em “.

Formal speech classes discourage embolalia so that speakers’ messages get their points across without any communication barriers. In fact, the public speaking organization Toastmasters International calls words and sounds of embolalia “crutch words.” You can even download an app called LikeSo that counts your overused filler words and teaches you how to remove them from your rhetoric.

Legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith discussed embolalia in 1991. Writing a daily column for 37 years, Smith was particularly critical of the word “good” creeping into everyday language. He decried “the insertion of the word ‘good’ where it is not necessary and has no grammatical function.”

Well I know what he means, because I use it all the time – in newspapers, all places! That is, we all have some bad habits.

Curtis Honeycutt is a humor columnist and treasurer of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He is the author of “Good Grammar is the Life of the Party: Tips for a Wildly Successful Life”. For more information, visit curtishoneycutt.com.