Randy from Live Oak, Florida, remembers a man in Central Florida who often added a few words to a simple sentence of explanation, usually thing ‘ere or thing like that and all. That might just reflect his own habitual way of speaking. Entertainer Jack Benny had a somewhat similar bit of speech pathology, inserting the expression you know throughout his speech, seemingly without being aware of it. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pathological Insertion of a Phrase into One’s Speech”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Randy from Live Oak, Florida, near the banks of the Swanee River.
My brother worked down in Central Florida. We grew up in Central Florida around Orlando.
My brother worked with a fellow, and he used a phrase that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody else use it.
I say phrase because he would describe something, put the first part of it in, and then describe something else and put the second part.
Without getting into something that’s technical and line crew in that, he might say something like, well, you bring that line in first, thing air, and then you bring those lines over next, thing like that and all.
Sometimes you just get thing air.
Sometimes you get thing air and then thing like that.
But most of the time it was thing air and then thing like that and all.
And I don’t know where that came from, but I’ve tried to look it up and I can’t find anything on it.
So it’s the thing here and the thing like that and all that you’re asking about.
Right. Mostly the thing here, obviously, because thing like that and all is just a series of words stuck together.
Although I’ve never heard him used that way.
Is your impression that he’s saying that thing here, but just dropping off the H, that he’s saying T-H-I-N-G space H-E-R-E?
I’m not sure. The first thing that came to my mind was, obviously, it’s not A-I-R like air, although that’s what it sounds like.
And came to my mind was Mount Airy in North Carolina, and for whatever reason, I kind of stuck those two together.
And I don’t know why, but maybe I kind of thought he might have been from, or his family may have come out of the Appalachian area.
But that may just be something sticking in my mind. I’m not sure.
I talked to my brother, and he didn’t know for sure where he came from.
And Orlando, certainly after Disney came in, was a real melting pot for people coming from other places.
So family could have been from almost anywhere.
That’s so interesting.
There are various kinds of speech pathologies where people interrupt their words with things, and they can’t help it.
It’s almost like stuttering, but it’s with words.
And I wonder if he’s got one of those happening to him.
The radio performer Jack Benny, although he was a fantastic performer and very successful, had one of these.
And his was you know.
And not in the way that people say you know, just as a filler or a thing that they’re holding on to the moment with while they come up with the next thing to say.
But he couldn’t stop himself from saying it.
It just came out, it just inserted itself at the end of a really great punchline or a really great bit of text or a good line reading.
It just automatically, the words, you know, showed up.
Even when they didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
And I wonder if this fellow has something like that going on.
It could have been.
Of course, we’re talking about probably early to mid-80s.
He’s long since passed away now.
So we have no way to ask him what the heck was going on.
And like you said, if it was a throwaway or something that just kind of came out, he might not even be able to tell you where he picked it up from.
And I hesitate to use the words throwaways because sometimes these things that seem to have no role in the sentence actually do take a role.
Like I was saying, sometimes they serve the purpose to pause while we collect our thoughts.
Sometimes they connect two ideas together.
Sometimes they give the other person in the conversation a chance to let the speaker know that they are listening and paying attention.
They’re a moment to say, are you listening?
And they look at the other person, and the other person makes a gesture or a sound to say that they are listening.
I want to talk a second about the thing that he says at the end of his sentence.
What was that collection of words?
Thing like that and all.
Right. That sounds like a sentence tag, Martha, doesn’t it?
It does. It does. Like, and thing, or something like that, that you hear sometimes in the south on the coast there.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sounds like the kind of thing that you just sort of add to a sentence.
And I suppose it means a little bit, you know, like plus similar things and actions or like that or something like that.
But it’s sort of a stock phrase that you just sort of insert without thinking, like Grant said.
Fascinating.
Fortunately, Randy, we have a large audience.
And if we know anybody else who has this particular pattern of speech or knows someone who does, I hope that they’ll let us know and tell us more about it.
We can find out if it’s just the one fellow that you worked with or if there are other people who say this, too.
And then maybe we can learn something from all these people who are reporting into us.
Well, let’s hope so.
All right.
Well, thanks for sharing your information and thanks for calling.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Be well.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you, Randy.
Bye-bye.
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