Hey, Hello, How are you?

You know that thing, where someone has a speech pattern, and they've always been doing it, and then you hear it, and it really starts to irritate you? Like this girl I know who always speaks in sentence fragments, with like questions in the middle of the sentence?

My mom does it. She always answers the phone in the same way. "Hey, Hello, How are you?" My sister pointed it out. Now I hear it all the time.

I do it too. When I'm waiting tables, I can't help it. "Is there anything else I can get for you right now?" I say it every time I leave the table. Every time! If I don't say it, I feel really awkward walking away.

There are certain phrases that now make me grit my teeth when I hear them. "The fact of the matter is..." and "Regardless of the fact that..."

Those are irritating. They sound redundant and they're pointless. They're placeholders while someone composes their thoughts. It's weird how repetitive people get about these things. "The fact" and "regardless of" are two things that my friend Beth absolutely needs when she's making a point. She literally cannot make a speech about her opinion on any subject without doing it.

That kind of thing makes me wonder, what kind of basis in an evolutionary sense does this have? Is it like social mores, where established practices of society dictate your actions? (yes, I checked wikipedia to make sure I was using this properly) Like among certain groups of people that use "fuck" as a noun, adjective and invective.

Ok, return to point after exploring wikipedia for about ten minutes. I've never seen a study of the reasons why someone would use these filler phrases in conversation. Is it just that we get in the habit of saying things a certain way?

Gotta go, Phone's ringing.

"Hey, hello, how are you?"