Talking is transmitting information and listening is receiving information. We can use the math from information theory to characterize that. That's 4.5 bits. In other words, 3.5 bits of potential is wasted. I took out all the vowels, no problem.
Words transmit tons of information.
That's around 15 bits per word. It's pretty hard to know what's coming. Imagine that you're at a loud party and you're trying to listen. If you're talking about your friend's weekend, you can probably follow along pretty well because you can predict the sorts of things to be discussed. Consider the experiment described above.