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 ...

We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, it's probably "ouch." But what kinds of "pain words" (or "interjections") do ...

Host Ira Flatow is joined by reporter Bob Holmes to talk about his coverage of the role of interjections in conversation. This story was originally published in Knowable Magazine. But these little ...