are too many of my post titles questions?

yes. which means i have to stop. i just got into a zone or something.

anyway, this is a hilarious piece in slate about interjections (i love when people write about grammar and usage).

the audio on the piece is pretty amusing, although i can't say i've ever seen "awwa" used in IMspeak. maybe i don't chat with enough 12-year-olds. in any case, i found this part the most entertaining:

"Most egregiously abused are what linguists call "discourse markers"—short sounds (it seems a stretch to call them "words") that speakers use to register hesitation, agreement, encouragement, ambivalence, and other responses. Uh, er, and um, in particular, have been flagrantly overused by feature writers and columnists to signal an impending attempt at irony or humor; the maneuver is now well beyond cliché, somewhere in the neighborhood of desperation. A LexisNexis search of major English-language newspapers for um yields 132 hits in just the last week, including a striking number in various newspapers' coverage of the Grammy Awards."

note to self, do not sound desperate when writing.