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 ...

This is a literary pentimento. In my untutored understanding, pentimento is an underlying image in a painting, a kind of original draft that is found underneath a top layer that is, itself, another ...

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 ...