The article reviews verbal hesitatives, specific elements of spoken spontaneous speech which occur in problematic points of speech making, fill in hesitation pauses and also have a function of a word, word combination or phrase search. Special attention is paid to situations in which the speaker, having found the necessary unit of speech, in a way distracts from it, contemplating, as if waiving off the responsibility for the correctness of nomination, showing their attitude to the particular unit (expressions such as “what do you call it”, “let’s put it this way”, “so-called”, etc in the speech flow).