Um

Um, I don’t know.

Let’s see... um... how about this?

It's a great test of the claims of open-source gurus, who say that a self-motivated community can outcode any team working for a single employer—like, um, Microsoft.

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.

Um And I don't know um what to say to the court other than, I don't know how we could get through 1/5 of that.

"About the same, wherever you go," he agreed. "Um," I said.

Um, excuse me!

While I was in her room, Sam walked by and said, “Um, I'm telling!” “You're telling what?” I asked. “You're reading Tori's journal,” she said.

Mair used to look after Laura. If anyone threatened to tease her, Mair would stand up straight, point her finger at the enemy and shout, 'Um! I'm telling on you!'

Meanwhile, in the popular mind umming was simply a bad habit, akin to spitting or picking one’s nose.

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.

Me be Injun. Him um Growling Bear. Him um heap big chief.

“me heap brave—me talk to um white man so[…] me good injun, like um white man, mebbe so, ugh!”