"Like" and "Um" Aren't All Bad, War Memorials

Guest Panel: Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, PhD, Linguistic Anthropologist and Writer; Alexandra D’Arcy, PhD, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Sociolinguistics Research Lab, University of Victoria; Scott Church, PhD, Assistant Professor of Communications, BYU; Nelson Flores, PhD, Assistant Professor of Educational Linguistics in the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Most public speaking professors urge you to leave “like,” “um,” “so,” and “ya know,” out of presentations at all costs. If these are filler words, it seems that getting rid of them would only improve communication. However, many linguists argue words like these serve a very important purpose. On top of that, they say trying to abolish them perpetuates a sneaky type of bias against women, young people, and some racial groups.

Guest: Scott Stephenson, PhD, Vice President of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programming at Museum of the American Revolution How we remember war is not always in line with what really happened. We want to believe the truth is simple, but in reality there is more to it than just two sides and one conflict.  Take the Revolutionary War, for instance. We learn in grade school the American colonists were united behind the heroic General George Washington in their fight for independence from Britain, but the truth was a lot messier. There were internal conflicts and contradictions, dark times and differing motivations for fighting, and Washington wasn’t the only hero.

Guest: Kirk Larsen, PhD, Professor of History, BYU A wartime conflict in Korea has been remembered differently for each side. It has been virtually forgotten in America, but is still well-remembered and taught to school children in North and South Korea, where it happened. We’re not talking about the Korean War in 1950. This conflict happened more than 75 years earlier and had an important role in shaping Korea’s relationship with the US. Obviously, the winners and losers of a war will remember it differently. But here we have a stark example of a conflict virtually wiped from the history books on one side, and enshrined by the other.