Inside Looking Out: In a manner of speaking …

Is it just me, or would any of you be bothered by a sports radio announcer who speaks like this?

“What I think, um, is if, um, the New York Giants expect to, um, make the playoffs, they will have to win, um, their next three games.”

To me, that translates into “um, um, um, um.” I get so fixated on his repeated mannerism, I can’t grasp what he’s talking about.

An anonymous athlete says, “We can, you know, get back to the top of the league, you know, if all the pieces, you know, come together.”

About halfway through what he’s trying to say I want to stop him and say, “No, I really don’t know!”

Then there’s, “I was going to take my grandkids to what da ya call it, Dorney Park, but, they say it’s going to, what da ya call it, rain, and if that happens, then they would close the what da ya call it, the park and refund the tickets.”

Now my intent here is not to make fun of people who don’t always speak properly. Anyone can get nervous and may need some “pause” words to gather their thoughts. It has happened to me, too. I would, uh sometimes, uh, speak like this myself.

I blame my problem of only hearing the repeated words on my seventh-grade geography teacher.

He would lecture our class, ending nearly every other sentence with the words, “If you will.”

“On the big island of Hawaii, there are extreme differences in temperatures, if you will. When you get up in the morning it might be 95 degrees. Then you go off on a long drive, if you will. After about three hours of driving up this particular mountain, the elevation is very high. You can actually ski because the temperature there, if you will, is 35 degrees.”

One day our class secretly decided to count the number of times he said “if you will.” When he got to 300, we’d give him a written proclamation to commemorate his achievement.

Months later he began a lecture with a count of 295. Little did he know the excitement was building intensely in the classroom. At 299, and with three minutes to go in the class, he failed to say, “if you will” one more time. We had to wait until the next day.

About a minute into our next class, he hit 300. Imagine his expression when we jumped up out of our seats to applaud his accomplishment. We presented him with a scrolled proclamation, beautifully written in calligraphy, by one of my classmates.

Soon after this moment, he said, “For tonight’s homework, read the next two chapters in your textbook, if you will, and prepare for a quiz tomorrow!”

Nowadays, I hear a lot our younger people, especially the girls, say, “Oh my God!” when they speak, or OMG when they text.

So of course, this is my newest dilemma.

It seems that any topic of discussion can be addressed with an “Oh my God!”

“I saw him yesterday after school and oh my God, he wasn’t with Sara, he was with Julie!”

“Oh my God! I have three tests tomorrow and then I have to run in a track meet after school.”

“I had to wait a half-hour after the game before my parents picked me up. Oh my God!”

I know this is said for effect, and yet, “oh my God” is supposed to signify something on the same level as, “The end of the world is coming!”

To flush all these mannerisms out of my ears and my mind, I need to purge them all at one time. So here goes.

When I write these, um, columns, you know, I only have so many words I can use, if you will. The what da ya call it, the space my editor allows limits me, to uh, about 700 words. The editor, you know, allows me, to um, go over the what da ya call it, that limit of words as long as I, you know, stay close.

Right now I have written exactly 704 words.

Oh my God! I better stop now!

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.