I realize you notice it but it's certainly not unusual. President Obama does something similar [1]. "the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so

I realize you notice it but it's certainly not unusual. President Obama does something similar [1]. "the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN." If that's what umming really means it wouldn't annoy me at all to umm more. Umming could also be the symptom of an additional mental load. Such speaking disturbances occur once in every 4.4 seconds [2], which suddenly makes me less worried and more tolerant about how people sound when they speak. [1] - http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/26/opinion/la-oe-daum-obamaspeak-20110526 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/26/opinion/la-oe-daum-o... [2] - http://www.themorningnews.org/article/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-um http://www.themorningnews.org/article/in-the-beginning-was-t...