Fillers

It is, like, totally, common, like, to be speaking with someone and hear, um, well, lots of different filler words, you know?

Discovering Spanish filler words has been interesting. My favorite filler is hombre, which literally means ‘man’. I was talking with a man in a café one day, and he kept using hombre randomly in his sentences. I’m thinking to myself, “What’s up with this dude? And why does he keep calling me ‘man’?” I wrote it off; the Spanish have done far weirder things. A week or so later, I noticed that my family had begun to use this word in conversation with me, and then um, it all, like, became clear: hombre is one of their filler words.