We usually don’t pay much attention to pauses in language – it’s easy to assume they’re just meaningless gaps between the meaningful words. But pauses are everywhere in spoken language – and, as Andrew Leong has been studying, in written language too. Pauses are not just an absence of meaning, but can drastically shift the meaning of the words around them. From an American short story, to a Japanese coming-of-age novel to a Japanese-American play, Andrew argues that pauses are a device for hinting at things left unsaid.