Taylor Mali's poem

So like, here it goes:


In his poem, Taylor Mali asks a simple question in a creative way. He wants to know why people don't speak with more conviction. Instead, we add in “filler” words or phrases such as like or ya know. This makes the statement sound less convincing and even less meaningful. Often times too, a speaker will turn a declarative statement into an interrogative one, i.e. they’ll make a question out of something that clearly isn’t one. Because of this, nobody is sure of anything. He ended his poem with by saying “we can’t just question authority, we must speak with it”.

His poem hit home in a few ways. I know a lot of people who could turn the truest facts into a question. “Two plus two equals fourrrr?” To me, it instantly begins to discredit what they’ve just said. To top that off, there’s plenty of people I know who insert so many likes into  a sentence I can only pay attention to every time they say it. I for one try to speak with conviction as often as possible. Sometimes people will listen to you because you sound like you know what you’re doing, not because you actually do. An infantry officer in the USMC would tell his men to “flank left now”. It’s imperative that they do so. His men would realize that and they’d comply. If he said “we should like flank left?” the sense of urgency is lost.

Unfortunately, I’m guilty too. I often catch myself saying like when I don’t need to or adding an umm or ugh when I don’t have my next words ready. Sometimes, when I’m giving an answer, I’ll say “isn’t that when the BLANK did BLANK?” It took me until now to realize why; we don’t want to be wrong. By not being sure, we can’t be punished for being wrong. Having said that, there’s a time and a place for speaking with conviction. If I’m with my friends, I don’t need to hear “ya know what I’m saying” after each part of their story. We're all equals here, you can act like you know what you're talking about for a few minutes.