I uh have a uh problem with the uh President

I knew a speech teacher once who had a cardinal rule. He absolutely did NOT allow "pause words" as he called them. He detested the unintelligent vocalizations made by people who had forgotten or lost track of what they were going to say. He would, in fact, tally up the number of times you said "er," "um," "uh," or any other similar sound and would take that many points off of your score for your presentation. He felt that should you lose your place or the flow of your speech that silence was preferable to anything else.

I must say that I agree with him on this point. It is distracting to me when I hear someone say "uh" over and over in their speech. I find that it detracts from the message as I fixate on the faltering as much as the speech.

I watched a news clip of President Obama today. It showed him in a fairly informal meeting discussing his economic stimulus plan. The clip was 1 minute 43 seconds long. I wasn't 20 seconds into it when I lost the flow of what he was saying and started fixating on the number of times he said "uh." You see, he said "uh" no less than 20 times in a 103 second clip. There were a couple where "uh" followed or preceeded "a" so I didn't count those and I may have missed one or two that piggybacked on one another. In the end, however, my tally came to 20.

That meant he said "uh" an average of once every 5 seconds.

Keep that in mind though over the next few months and I'll bet you it reduces drastically. He'll have some PR speech expert use a shock collar if necessary to break him of the habit.