Meaningless words

Seth Godin writes,

There are words that now have no meaning at all.

Literally no meaning.

We write them to take up space. To make ourselves seem more serious or smarter.

We speak them to give ourselves a pause, a moment to catch up to our riff.

‘Well’ and ‘so’ have been doing this work for a long time, but add to that the more syllabic words like ironically, literally, and hopefully.

And don’t forget all the adjectives, beginning with ‘very’ and ‘really’ that (ironically) make something sound smaller, not bigger.

When you remove meaningless words, the power of your words goes up.