Listener supported WNYC Studios.

Hey, it's Flora.

A little detour before we start the show.

We are rounding up your questions about roads.

What confounds you about traffic or how interstates are laid out?

Are there certain road design elements

that ignite your road rage? Call us and tell us about it. We've got a traffic engineer in the passenger

seat this week, ready to answer your questions. 8774-4-sigh-fry is our number 8774-7-4-7-4. Okay, now on to the show.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Today on the podcast, a new antibiotic that's literally

a sweet surprise. But first, the importance of interjections. You know, those

filler words we all say, like, uh, mm-hmm, and huh? Linguists used to think they were sort of the

detritus that accumulates around the edges of conversations, but it's turning out that they're

actually doing a lot more than that.

I once got a phone call from someone who wanted to use Science Friday to teach English as a second language. I said, I was so glad to hear that she wanted to use science to teach English.

Well, there was a long pause and she said,

actually, I like the way you interrupt people. Yeah, I do that a lot, don't I, or I interject often to

move the conversation along. What I recently learned is that interjections are an important

part of our conversations and have been studied quite a bit.

Joining me now to tell us more is my guest who recently wrote all about the role of interjections for Noble magazine.

Bob Holmes is a science journalist based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me.

You're welcome. Okay, so you've written about the role of what linguistics call interjections. Can you

...