Hide and go seek

People hedge when they don't really want to give the heart of a story or set of events.  There are many reasons for hedging.  Sometimes, people are just private people and don't like others to know their business, such as their salary, their weight, their religious preferences or beliefs, their middle name, where they were born, and a host of other details about them.  They're just private.  They're not really hiding things.

Most of the time people are hiding things, though.  People hide when they have made a faux pas, when they have embarrassed themselves in some way, when they have seen or heard something they weren't supposed to see or hear, or when the timing of a happening is not to their advantage.  People hide things from everyone except certain people close to them sometimes.  But, people definitely hide things they have done that are wrong, either morally for them or illegally.

Psychologists, detectives, agents in espionage, and attorneys are groups of professionals that have studied how to crack the code on people who hide things.  They have developed techniques to try to bring out the event that is hidden.  Torture is the oldest technique, but a person doesn't ever really know if what is given up in torture is really the hidden event.  People give up hidden things merely to escape pain.

Three very popular techniques that have been around for decades and are still used are polygraph testing, reading gestures and eye movement, and highlighting hedges.  The first two are accurate to a small degree when used on people who haven't been subjected to them.  However, they are easily defeated by practiced people who hide events.  Hedges, on the other hand, take much more rehearsal for people to free themselves from because speech habits are hard to break.

The best known hedging word is the word well.  What follows that word is a thought carefully worded.  The utterance uh with a pause of .5 seconds or more is also a widely used feature of hiding something.  Other characteristic speech habits signaling a hedge are use of fillers like you know, I mean, you know what I mean, that was something, right, I'm telling you, so... (when drawn out or lengthened past normal timing of the following words).    Most of the time people use hedges to word something to follow that will divert attention or tell an innocuous portion of the event they are hiding. Hedges come in other forms as well.

It doesn't necessarily take an alert listener to hear or recognize a hedge.  But, it does take an astute person to know how to explore and probe the ideas, stories, or event hidden by the hedge.  The fun is just beginning for the forensic linguist or other intuitive professional or person who loves sliding back the curtain a little at a time after a hedge is used.  What is hidden is soon to be revealed.