The tiniest quirks in our speech can change how we’re perceived. But, um, filler words aren’t the villains they’re made out to be. They’re, you know, working behind the scenes. “We group them all together as these kind of garbage words,” says Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English . “We call them ‘filler words,’ and fillers are things we don't like—you don't want fillers in your