Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, it’s probably “ouch”. But what kinds of “pain words” (or “interjections”) do ...