What’s wrong with ‘"'til"? Why tiny words control conversations. How many cookies?
17:25 Share

Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills.

Wait, did I say job title yet? Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply.

Let's face it. After a night with drinks, even just a couple, it can be hard to bounce back the next day. To wake up feeling fresh, there's Z-Biotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink, a probiotic invented by PhD scientists to break down the toxic byproduct of alcohol.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

I regularly receive questions from people who are confused about the words until, till spelled T-I-L-L, and till with an apostrophe at the beginning, T-I-L.

When you're talking about a period of time that has to last before something happens, till, T-I-L-L, and until are equivalent. Don't believe it? Check a dictionary. Some sources say that until sometimes has a more formal sound than till, but often the two words are just interchangeable. Here are two examples. We spun in circles until we were dizzy. We ran till we were breathless.

And till, T-I-L-L, isn't a contraction of until either. They are two separate words. Until actually came first. It's the older word first used in the 12th century. People didn't start using until until the 13th century. Nearly all the style guides I checked recommended against using till with an apostrophe at the beginning T-I-L.

For example, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says the form is etymologically incorrect. The Chicago Manual of Style says it should not be written TIL with an apostrophe. And Garner's Modern English Usage calls it incorrect with no literary history. In fact, Garner says people didn't even start thinking TIL with an apostrophe was okay until the 1980s. So it's quite a recent thing.

Many style guides also go out of their way to emphasize that till, T-I-L-L, is fine, which is often a clue that at some point people said it wasn't. And given that I've had to answer questions about disputes over the word, I think that if you want to completely avoid controversy, it's safest to stick with until. But I'll do my part and say there's absolutely nothing wrong with till.

Now, one final interesting thing is the etymology of till. We've been talking about the preposition and conjunction, but of course, it's also a verb that means to work dirt, as in to till the land, and a noun that means a box or drawer that holds money, as in put your money in the cash register till. You might think that these words all came from the same place, since they're all spelled the same, but they don't.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, all three have completely different origins. So that's your Quick and Nerdy Tip. Until and till, T-I-L-L, are essentially interchangeable. If you want to be super safe, stick with until and definitely avoid till with the apostrophe. This next piece originally appeared in Knowable magazine.

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation, and you'll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words, mm-hmm, um, huh, and the like, that don't convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren't as articulate as they'd like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation, as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself, and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose that we barely noticed, says Mark Dingemans, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that's what they had records of. But once recordings of conversations became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing. When they did, they observed that interjections—that is, short utterances of just a word or two that aren't part of a larger sentence—were ubiquitous in everyday speech.

One in every seven utterances are one of these things, says Dingemance, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. You're going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently we need them. Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. Think of it as a toolkit for conducting interactions, says Dingemance.

If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need. An um or ah from a speaker, for example, signals that they're about to pause but aren't finished speaking. A quick huh or what from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

And that need seems to be universal. In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingamance and his colleagues found that all of them used a short neutral syllable similar to huh as a repair signal, probably because it's quick to produce. In that moment of difficulty, you're going to need the simplest possible question word, and that's what huh is, says Dingamance. We think all societies will stumble on this for the same reason.

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call continuars, such as mm-hmm, signals from listeners that they're paying attention and that the speaker should keep going. Once again, the form of the word is well-suited to its function because mm-hmm is made with a closed mouth. It's clear that the signaler doesn't intend to speak.

Sign languages often handle continuars differently, but then again, two people signing at the same time can be less disruptive than two people speaking, says Carl Borchdel, a linguist at the University of Bergen in Norway. In Swedish sign language, for example, listeners often sign yes as a continuer for long stretches, but to keep this continuer unobtrusive, the sender tends to hold their hands lower than usual.

Different interjections can send slightly different signals. Consider, for example, one person describing to another how to build a piece of IKEA furniture, says Allison Nguyen, a psycholinguist at Illinois State University. In such a conversation, mm-hmm might indicate that the speaker should continue explaining the current step. Well, yeah or okay could imply that the listener is done with that step and it's time to move on to the next.

You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster.

According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.

Indeed.com slash podcast. Continuers aren't merely for politeness. They really matter to a conversation, says Dinkelmans. In one classic experiment from more than two decades ago, 34 undergraduate students listened as another volunteer told them a story.

Some of the listeners gave the usual, I'm listening signals, while others who'd been instructed to count the number of words beginning with the letter T were too distracted to do so. The lack of normal signals from the listeners led to stories that were less well-crafted, the researchers found. That shows that these little words are quite consequential, says Dingamass.

Nguyen agrees that such words are far from meaningless. They really do a lot of mutual understanding and mutual conversation, she says. She's now working to see if emojis serve similar functions in text conversations. The role of interjections goes even deeper than regulating the flow of conversation.

Interjections also help in negotiating the ground rules of a conversation. Every time two people converse, they need to establish understanding of where each is coming from, what each participant knows to begin with, what they think the other person knows, and how much detail they want to hear. Much of this work, what linguists call grounding, is carried out by interjections.

If I'm telling you a story and you say something like, wow, I might find that encouraging and add more detail, says Wen. But if you do something like, uh-huh, I'm going to assume you aren't interested in more detail. A key part of grounding is working out what each participant thinks about the other's knowledge, says Martina Wilczko, a theoretical linguist at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain.

Some languages, like Mandarin, explicitly differentiate between I'm telling you something you didn't know and I'm telling you something that I think you already knew. In English, that task falls largely on interjections. One of Wilczko's favorite examples is the Canadian ae.

"'If I tell you you have a new dog, I'm usually not telling you stuff you don't know, so it's weird for me to tell you,' she says. "'But you have a new dog, eh?' Eliminates the weirdness by flagging the statement as news to the speaker, not the listener. Other interjections can indicate that the speaker knows they're not really giving the other participant what they sought. "'If you ask me what the weather's like in Barcelona, I can say, well, I haven't been outside yet,' says Wilchcoe."

The well is an acknowledgment that she's not quite answering the question. Wilczko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. I haven't found a language that doesn't do these three general things. What I know, what I think you know, and turn-taking, she says.

They are key to regulating conversations. She adds, we're building common ground and we're taking turns. Details like these aren't just arcana for linguists to obsess over. Using interjections properly is a key part of sounding fluent in speaking a second language, notes Wilczko. But language teachers often ignore them.

When it comes to language teaching, you get points deducted for using ums and uhs because you're not fluent, she says. But native speakers use them because it helps. They should be taught. Artificial intelligence, too, can struggle to use interjections well, she notes, making them the best way to distinguish between a computer and a real human. And we'll talk about that in a minute. And interjections also provide a window to interpersonal relationships.

These little markers say so much about what you think, she says, and they're harder to control than the actual content. Maybe couples therapists, for example, would find that interjections afford useful insights into how their clients regard one another and how they negotiate power in a conversation.

The interjection, oh, often signals confrontation, she says, as in the difference between, do you want to go out for dinner? And, oh, so now you want to go out for dinner? Indeed, these little words go right to the heart of language and what it's for. Language exists because we need to interact with one another, says Borstel. For me, that's the main reason for language being so successful.

Dingamass goes one step further. Interjections, he says, don't just facilitate our conversations. In negotiating points of view and grounding, they're also how language talks about talking. With huh, you say not just, I don't understand, says Dingamass. It's, I understand you're trying to tell me something, but I didn't get it. That reflexivity enables more sophisticated speech and thought.

Indeed, he says, I don't think we'd have complex language if it weren't for those simple words. And now getting back to AI, you might wonder, can AI learn to use interjections?

Well, to make artificial intelligence sound more natural, developers are building interjections into its responses. Google's Notebook LM, for example, offers the option of summarizing information, say one or more scientific papers, in the form of a podcast hosted by two AI-generated hosts.

On first hearing, the program does a pretty good job. The hosts laugh, joke, and insert mm-hmm and wow at superficially appropriate times. But to the ears of a trained linguist, there's still something amiss. People have kind of dismissed interjections as primitive. Yeah. You know, as outside of proper language. Like back in the 1700s, this guy John Juan took. Oh. He even called them...

They almost work, but not quite, says the theoretical linguist Martina Wilczko of the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies. They kind of remind me of AI art, where there's too many fingers. You don't see it at first, but if you look carefully, you see that something's wrong. One tell is that when the listener mm-hmms or laughs, the speaker pauses while they do so, lending a slightly creepy note to the simulated conversation.

To me, it's almost like the uncanny valley, says Wilchco. It's close, but not quite close enough. The biggest deficiency, though, is a robust sense of who knows what in the conversation. The AI hosts seem to flip back and forth on which one knows which piece of information. It's not just what they're saying, it's who's talking in what context and who knows what, says Wilchco. I'd be really surprised if the AI could ever handle that and human beings handle it with ease.

That segment was written by Bob Holmes, a science writer living in Edmonton, Canada, and who until recently had no idea how often he uses interjections. The piece originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a digital publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. And they've produced a special standalone episode of their podcast about interjections. So if you want to learn more, check that out too. You can find their podcast and explore new articles at knowablemagazine.org.

Finally, I have a friend-elect and fam-elect story from Katie.

Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Mrs. Katie West of West Seattle. And my call today is both a femlect and a friendlect. I'm going to start with my friendlect because I love the heck out of my best friend, who is the mother of my nephew, Aiden. Her name is Fissy Ray. But our friendlect is that she likes to say mer when she has pretty much nothing else to say about topic. Or when...

you ask a silly question or she can't quite understand what was said or the question that was asked, she'll say, how many cookies? So those are the words that I love the most. And then my favorite is that my mom and my brothers will always be in front of me because I'm extremely emotional when it comes to like watching movies that have, you know, subjects that are

Great catching for somebody who's empathic. And as soon as they would see me starting to cheer up, they would go, oh, pure cheer, cry, cry. And that became a thing that we ended up saying to anybody in that kind of reason to fry for, well, here's another good reason at all. Anyways, have a great day. Thanks, Katie. I love how many cookies. It's such a non sequitur.

If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. And if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin in marketing, Dan Feierabend in audio, Morgan Christensen in advertising, Brandon Goetjes, director of podcasts, Holly Hutchings in digital operations, and Nat Hoops in marketing, who almost fell off the Grand Canyon when he was 14. Yikes. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily. That's all. Thanks for listening.

I need directions for paying down debt. Starting route. Apply for a SoFi personal loan and consolidate your debt into one fixed payment. Turn right into a positive outlook and get $5,000 to $100,000 as soon as the same day you sign with no fees required.

Got it. You could get out of high-interest credit card debt with a SoFi personal loan. View your rate at SoFi.com slash debt in 60 seconds with no impact to your credit score. Loans originated by SoFi Bank in A. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions at SoFi.com slash debt. NMLS 696891. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.

Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.

And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast.