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A buddy of mine started me on a similar habit that I find obnoxious but impossible to kick. It started when we were in a meeting with an executive (who was a w
by mdip 1y ago
A buddy of mine started me on a similar habit that I find obnoxious but impossible to kick.
It started when we were in a meeting with an executive (who was a wonderful man) who -- due to nerves -- used the filler phrase "ya know" about twice a sentence -- like someone who's nervous might use the filler word "um" or "uh."
When the meeting was over, I'd joked that he'd said "ya know" three times in the same sentence and without missing a beat he said "541, I counted"[0]. He went on to explain that when someone repeats a word/phrase, especially if it's a word that's used "to sound intelligent", he can't help but count.
Incidentally, despite having no reason to be suspicious[1], I didn't believe him and being in an IT department with its share of folks with social anxiety and various forms of autism[2], it took all of a day before we were in another meeting with someone who, I think, pronounced "infeasible" as "in-THESE-able." A minor mistake, but he repeated it a solid thirty times and liked to really push that emphasis on the second syllable. We got out of the meeting and I asked for his number. "37"[0] he said. I was one off. It ended up becoming a weird sort of corporate meeting game that we did a few times a month over 17 years. It's a ridiculously easy habit to pick up, it turns out. I've been out of that job for years and I still do it. No real reason, any longer. I don't think less of people who don't have a solid command of public speaking -- as in, I'm not doing it for the purpose of feeling superior or being a d!ck and pointing it out to them. The only people that know I do this (other than readers of my comments on HN) are my kids and the guy who got me hooked.
[0] The exact number escapes me but it was a suspiciously random sounding number
[1] This guy marched to the beat of a different drummer. I have so many stories of outlandish claims he made that turned out to be absolutely true by this point that I should have taken him at his word. By this point he'd shown me a receipt indicating his bill was less than a dime for what must have been two carts worth of groceries (early 2000s), and it was only a dime because he bought something from the register to avoid a negative balance (a problem he's navigated in the past).
[2] Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago> [2] Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well. That hypercorrection is ghastly.
- globnomulous 1y agoMyself agrees.
- jaggederest 1y agoI swear I did this once in school, to a teacher with a notoriously circuitous manner of speaking, by holding up my fingers and counting the filler words, and he slowly noticed it, became mildly horrified, and... fixed it, within about 6 weeks. Pretty impressive, I wonder what he did to change so quickly. Originally he'd take 2 minutes to get through his name and phone number on a voicemail, and a few months later you wouldn't even recognize him by how clear and concise he was.
- craftkiller 1y agoWith how great speech recognition is becoming, it seems like this is something remote workers could easily discreetly do since our conversations tend to be stationary, through a computer, and with only a small part of our body visible. Just wire up some electrodes to zap you every time the computer detects filler. I'm now seriously considering doing it myself.
- alex1115alex 1y agoOne of our app devs built this recently, but for swearing: https://youtube.com/shorts/FthRCwn1JuM?si=lC3eWAUI7sV-LL-r https://youtube.com/shorts/FthRCwn1JuM?si=lC3eWAUI7sV-LL-r A wearable speech coach would be awesome, though. Detect filler words and give you an alert on your HUD when it detects "uh" "uhm" etc.
- craftkiller 1y agoNeat! Without the electrodes I don't think it would be effective for me for "uhh" / "uhm". Considering how unconscious filler words are, I think I'd need the immediate unignorable feedback. But you've got all the logic there, it just needs to be made more violent.
- khafra 1y agoHow should the speech coach stimulate you when it detects you using a particularly euphonously or impactfully?
- 1y ago
- stronglikedan 1y ago> his bill was less than a dime for what must have been two carts worth of groceries (early 2000s) Ah, yes, the coupon cutters that would spend all of their free time trying to get a deal. But if they were happy doing it, then who am I to judge.
- mdip 1y agoHe did it more out of necessity, originally, but when I met him, yeah, it was "for fun". Among the other stories I found to be true was "I worked at KFC for $8/hr and owned a home[0]" [0] In a lower-middle-class neighborhood.
- e3bc54b2 1y agoNow I want more of these stories. I've met couple of drummers among sitarists in life but you've got 17 years(!) worth of stories :D
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agotangentially, i really like that turn of phrase (drummers among sitarists) :)
- codersfocus 1y agoMore likely he learned the algorithm to create fake coupons himself. If I recall correctly it's literally just the UPC and how much to take off. There was NO security to the system.
- frereubu 1y agoFor my sins I was once in a Microsoft SQL training session. The guy leading it was great, but at the end of every thought he'd make a noise in his throat, like "uhn" or similar. I couldn't stop noticing it acting like a carriage return at the end of each thought, and hyper-fixated on it to the extent that I learnt precisely nothing.
- djmips 1y agoNvidia or someone needs to get on a method to filter out the filler words / weird sounds in realtime and failing that automated post processing of saved presentations.
- HPsquared 1y agoTeams already has a kind of 'speaker coach' feature, that could be extended. Looking forward to videoconferences with filtered faces and speech that has been smoothed over with the occasional computer glitch, but people still prefer it.
- olyjohn 1y agoI feel like the next big thing for Teams is going to be AI monitoring your emotional microexpressions via webcam. Then it'll give a presenter or manager or executive a summary of all of your emotions throughout the meeting with timestamps. We won't even have the privacy of our thoughts anymore. But it'll be a great tool to enforce conformity.
- djmips 1y agough
- Suppafly 1y agoA team I was on onetime had some French workers and one of them was very helpful, but every sentence had him struggling to think of at least one English word or phrase and he did this weird guttural clearing throat uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound, like a car backfiring or a lawnmower starting up, instead using an actual filler word or something like "how you say..?"
- craftkiller 1y agoI once worked for a CEO that pronounced "year" as "yeah". I loved it. Every meeting felt like a pep rally because it was sprinkled with phrases like "we've got four yeahs" and "we worked all yeah on this".
- alsetmusic 1y agoNortheast USA, maybe NY or NJ?
- craftkiller 1y agoI think he was Australian but we were in silicon valley at the time (though I live+work in that area now).
- nopassrecover 1y agoYeah I can picture it. The non-rhotic R on its own doesn’t narrow it further, but there would be distinction within Australia based on the sounds of the “ea” part. Off the cuff I can picture some Australians taking it more nasally at the top of the palate sort of yee-ah (think Steve Irwin), a more neutral yeehr with a hint of final r (but more clipped and mono syllable than an American accent), or even a yair that might push as far as yuhhh (heading towards a sort of hybrid of Californian Valley Girl and the posh British accent used in American media). Bit of an exploration of the evoking Australian accent here: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103321146 https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103321146
- dylan604 1y agoAustralians have other speech things too like shortening words and ending them with a long E sound. breakfast => breaky(or however they spell it down under). or adding an "oh" syllable to words like right-o
- hoseja 1y agoAll dose poiple, all dose hamboigahs.
- 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago> pronounced "infeasible" as "in-THESE-able." What other way could you pronounce it? https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=0215ca7c86a2fe5f&sxsrf=AHTn8zplAqY4oS4G8v_ulNmxFPVMbFlpsA:1744642943778&q=how+to+pronounce+infeasible&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOMIfcRowy3w8sc9YSnjSWtOXmPU5eINKMrPK81LzkwsyczPExLjYglJLcoV4pPi4eLKzEtLTSzOTMpJtWJRYkrN41nEKp2RX65Qkq9QANSVD9SWqoBQBAAxpO4FXwAAAA&pron_lang=en&pron_country=us&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi83rG35deMAxU_KkQIHUVhGVAQ3eEDegQINRAM https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=0... ...unless you're saying he pronounced the 'F' as a 'TH'?
- andelink 1y ago> pronounced the 'F' as a 'TH'? That’s how I read it
- psunavy03 1y agoIf you speak publicly at all as part of your job, it's actually a good thing to keep track of your verbal/physical tics and try to eliminate/minimize them. Whether it's "umm," "you know," a hand gesture you keep doing, subconsciously swaying back and forth slightly, or whatever. They're all distracting even before you get to the level where people start counting them.
- disambiguation 1y ago20 ;) [0](https://quillbot.com/grammar-check https://quillbot.com/grammar-check)
- georgebcrawford 1y ago"beat of a different drummer." I really want to check if it's drum or drummer, but will refrain and live in hope that it was a clever joke
- tomcam 1y agoAlso be careful about adding an “f”
- charlieglass 1y agoI thought is was just "marches to the beat of his own drum." That way, no other party is involved, it is him doing life the way he way he wants to.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WWLink 1y agoI had a college professor who used "basically" and "essentially" so much that it was awfully distracting.
- tomcam 1y agoWhich bothers me a lot in that context. Those are normally powerful distinctions in an academic context…
- aoanevdus 1y agoWhen I was a kid, an adult told me that I should stop using “basically” as a filler word because people will interpret it as an insult to their intelligence (ie. “You’re not smart enough for the whole thing, so I will just tell you the basic version”). I’ve been attentive to the way other people use the word ever since, and I think they have a point. Some people say it very frequently and don’t mean anything by it. But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.
- jodrellblank 1y agoThe other side of that is offering a ‘basically’ version out of respect for the listener, assuming they have more important things to do than listen to a detailed nerd-rambling of something they aren’t interested in. Listener/speaker can expand on the details or ask questions later, if needed. It’s possible to mean it either way, or to hear it and interpret it either way.
- HPsquared 1y agoI prefer "essentially" ... pretty much the same meaning but it's more like a sign of respect "I'm summarising this point to its essence for brevity, as you are perfectly capable of filling in the blanks yourself".
- HelloMcFly 1y agoThis seems like a highly overwrought analysis where the adult formed a mental model, began assuming the motivations and intentions of others with certainty, and passed on this "lesson" a malleable mind who had no reason to debate it. The idea that people use this word as a subtle/unintentional insult to others' intelligence rather than as a synonym for "essentially"... I just don't know how people arrive at such ungenerous conclusions so confidently.
- al_borland 1y agoI’ve played similar games at work when people were particularly distracting by how often they said some of these things. Funny enough, “ya know” was one of the main phrases. I hear that a lot from people in NJ, I’m curious if your co-worker was from NJ as well, or the general vicinity.
- protocolture 1y agoI find a lot of people in IT and adjacent areas picked up a lot of their vocab by reading, without any guidance on pronunciation. I tend to let them get to 3 goes before correcting them.
- freedomben 1y agoIndeed, this is a very common occurence IME. It's happened to me a couple times (especially the word "contiguous" which to this day I don't think I've heard another person pronounce out loud other than myself, and I find the word confuses people), but I hear it constantly. Even the word "Linux" (you often hear pronounced "Lie-Nix") often gets people. Then considering all the acronyms which don't have a standardized pronunciation, it's an interesting time.
- marcusb 1y agoI interviewed someone once for a network engineering job and, while talking about multicast routing, he mentioned Rendezvous Points[0], only he pronounced rendezvous as "Ron-divi-us". I asked him to describe RPs in a bit more detail (but pronounced rendezvous correctly[1],) and he said "oh, that's how you say that? That makes sense..." He had heard (and used) the phrase rendezvous point before - in the Army -- but didn't make the connection to the weird spelling he encountered with the multicast documentation. 0 - in Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse-mode routing, an RP is the root of the shared tree of participants for a given multicast group. See RFC 2362. 1 - for an English speaker, anyway. I imagine a native French speaker could pick apart the way we pronounce rendezvous.
- vmatouch 1y agoRegarding "to sound intelligent," I've recently begun distinguishing between two forms: 1) Saying something correctly but unnecessarily complicated - for example, when a project manager says, "We do not have financial resources for that," instead of simply, "We don't have money for that," when declining a team dinner (a CFO's report is another story). 2) Saying something incorrectly - for instance, "It is really flustrating." I've started to dislike the latter more. The former involves people who at least use correct phrases, even if they're trying too hard to impress others. The latter indicates people who simply don't read.
- mannykannot 1y ago'Flustrated' looked to me like a potentially useful portmanteau word, and at least Merriam-Webster seems to agree, which would give some legitimacy to 'flustrating'. Whether the person you hear saying the latter had this in mind is, of course, another matter. To give an idea of how I see it as potentially useful, there are some frustrating events which leave a person in no doubt that there's nothing they can do to remedy the situation (or that they have no choice but to put a lot of work into fixing a situation which never should have arisen), while others might leave a person in a tizzy over what to do now.
- dylan604 1y agoThere's plenty of times I've deliberately used a made up word that onomatopoetically just fit better. See? It just works. I absolutely know when I'm doing it, and it's not a confusing/conflating of two words situation. I see it no different than when people say any new phrase like how people just say "bet" in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the word's definition. At least what I'm doing still uses the meaning of the pormanteau's base words appropriately rather than just using a word randomly because it's hip
- drekipus 1y agoI actually LOVE making up words that fit. it's a little side game i like to play. sometimes language has gaps. sometimes it's worth it to just invent a word to convey meaning.
- robofanatic 1y agoThis behavior has some parallels with what happens in the movie Dinner for Schmucks.
- globnomulous 1y ago> Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well. "My friend and I."
- m463 1y agoYou are honing skills that will help you with drinking games... EDIT: example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_game#Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_game#Arts