[mdip]

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.

[jaggederest]

I 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.

[tomcam]

Wonderful story but we must also acknowledge the teacher for going along with it so gracefully

[craftkiller]

With 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.

[HPsquared]

Your non-verbal communication sent the message.

[frereubu]

For 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.

[Suppafly]

A 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..?"

[djmips]

Nvidia 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.

[protocolture]

I 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.

[marcusb]

I 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.

[freedomben]

Indeed, 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.

[vmatouch]

Regarding "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]

'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.

[sdiupIGPWEfh]

> The latter indicates people who simply don't read.

Or more charitably, their vocabulary is fine and they merely suffer from noun recall deficiency and or other issues with public speaking. I personally find myself thinking two or more equally valid ways to express a thought, then fumble, saying a mix of both.

[gosub100]

Sort of a variant on 1) I dislike speakers that overuse "essentially" and "basically". I think their motivations vary but almost always the words can be removed without any change in meaning.

[craftkiller]

I 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".

[HPsquared]

A LOT of people in the nuclear industry pronounce it as 'nucular'. I'm a little horrified.

[alsetmusic]

Northeast USA, maybe NY or NJ?

[DiggyJohnson]

Boston?

[psunavy03]

If 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.

[stronglikedan]

> 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]

He 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.

[codersfocus]

More 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.

[WWLink]

I had a college professor who used "basically" and "essentially" so much that it was awfully distracting.

[aoanevdus]

When 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.

[tomcam]

Which bothers me a lot in that context. Those are normally powerful distinctions in an academic context…

[al_borland]

I’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.

[m463]

You are honing skills that will help you with drinking games...

EDIT: example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_game#Arts

[globnomulous]

> Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well.

"My friend and I."

[georgebcrawford]

"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

[charlieglass]

I 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.

[tomcam]

Also be careful about adding an “f”

[disambiguation]

20 ;)

[0](https://quillbot.com/grammar-check)

[robofanatic]

This behavior has some parallels with what happens in the movie Dinner for Schmucks.

[lo_zamoyski]

> [2] Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well.

That hypercorrection is ghastly.

[globnomulous]

Myself agrees.

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> 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=0...

...unless you're saying he pronounced the 'F' as a 'TH'?

[andelink]

> pronounced the 'F' as a 'TH'?

That’s how I read it