AMERICAN IDOL NOTES
American Idol voters sent Kristy Lee Cook back to Selma, Oregon last night. The 24-year-old singer impressed guest coach Mariah Carey with her rendition of Carey's "Forever," but the apparently America disagreed.
Ryan Seacrest started the night with usual toying as he honed in on the Bottom Three. Former Idol singer Elliott Yamin took the stage to sing "Free," and Mariah came out to perform her new single "Bye Bye." Then it was down to the business of the Bottom Three, and Brooke White and Syesha Mercado joined Cook at the back of the pack. But, as predicted by Simon Cowell, Cook was the girl to go. She was in tears as she took the stage for her final performance of "Forever," which seemed to be directed at Simon.
LOTS OF FILLER
According to a recent study in England, TEN PERCENT of our speech is wasted on "filler" words like "um", "you know" and "like".
British speech experts analyzed 80 hours of conversations between 150 people, and they found that the average person uses meaningless conversation fillers such as "basically" and "at the end of the day" every NINE seconds.
According to the researchers, people in countries like the U.S. and Britain use more filler words than other countries because we don't take care of our language the way other cultures do.
That means we don't pride ourselves on our use of language... like French people do, for example... and that's led to the dumbed-down version we now speak.
