This week in class I chose to observe how often we use specific words. I chose the words “like”, “um”, “kinda”, “ok”, and “so”, because I wanted to see how often they actually occur in conversation. I’ve always been reprimanded for using “like” so often, so I wondered if it would be used as frequently in class as it is in normal conversation. Turns out, its used fairly commonly in class as well. Additionally, after the first hour of class I realized that almost every sentence either began with “so” or used “so” as a conjunction. Here are the results of my tally.
It turns out that “so” barely edged out “like” for most frequently used. “Um” was a decently close third place. “Ok” and “kinda” were not frequent at all, which I found surprising. In hindsight, other words that I would have been interesting to include are “you know”, “sorta”, “well”, “stuff”, and “whatever”.