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 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
craftkiller 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
craftkiller 12 minutes ago [-]
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".
frereubu 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
stronglikedan 30 minutes 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.
lo_zamoyski 35 minutes ago [-]
> [2] Myself and (I suspect) my friend are diagnosed ASD as well.
That hypercorrection is ghastly.
KineticLensman 2 hours ago [-]
We used to make notes of management-isms and then play buzzword-bingo in company-wide meetings. When you got a full card, to properly win, you were required to ask the management a question that included the word 'house' (saying 'bingo' would have been too obvious, even for our managers).
marcusb 1 hours ago [-]
I once had a coworker who called this "bullshit bingo" and had a bingo grid drawn on a whiteboard at her desk with all of the latest buzzwords.
On a somewhat-related note, my grandfather told me that while he was in Officer Candidate School in the Army, there would be someone assigned to ring a bell whenever a person who was leading a briefing or otherwise presenting faltered with an "oral pause" (uh, ummm, etc.) I don't know if this was a normal or ongoing practice.
quercusa 40 minutes ago [-]
Toastmasters has someone assigned to count these when someone is making a speech but the bell is next level.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
We used to do this for every earnings call.
We printed up bingo cards filled with buzzwords, products, trends, things we thought the analysis might say, etc.
We charged $15 per card, all of which was pooled and given to the charity of the winner's choice. When the CEO caught on, he started matching the donations.
There was a reverse version of this played too. We voted in Slack for some weird word or phrase that the CEO or CFO had to say during the earnings calls. They were super awkward and totally unrelated, and the goal was they had to weasel the phrase in somehow. It was pretty funny.
(For someone else in the know, without giving away the company, do you remember any of the wacky phrases?)
CPLX 28 minutes ago [-]
I once had to work with a consultant who was the most over the top bullshit artist I had ever seen in my life. Their line of work was getting "out of it" execs to feel like he understood the online world and getting paid to create nonsense launches.
I used to take notes and just try to capture the buzzword onslaught. Here's an old notepad cut-and-paste from a single 90 minute meeting this guy was in:
We should sidebar
I’ll call an audible and order lunch
So maybe we’ll put that into a live fire exercise
We’re elbow deep now
I’m starting to ladder into goals and tactics
Let’s explore this for a second so we can put it in the parking lot
Let’s take a bio-break
It’s not on the top of my want-to-do list
I want to get back to some more basic block and tackle
If you look at it as crawl, walk, run. I mean I hate that metaphor, but we’re transitioning from crawl to walk
I have some suggestions around merchandising homepage content
I’ve already done concepting
It’s analytics with icebreaking on the social side
I’ll type up outputs and share
We’re potentially opening the aperture on expert interviews
Out of this decision comes wayfinding for that decision
I’m looking for the exponential in this
Alright, I think we can land it
delichon 2 hours ago [-]
I take joy in inventing new broken cliches and save them up for conversations. If I saw someone keeping score I'd ask them to publish a leaderboard so that I could compete for bragging wrongs.
jagged-chisel 1 hours ago [-]
> … bragging wrongs
Brilliant.
wut-wut 1 hours ago [-]
Same faml, same.
mhb 2 hours ago [-]
The risk of getting flagged added to the pressure of presenting at meetings, Murphy said. “All the sudden you’ll hear a pen click, and you’re thinking, ‘What did I say that wasn’t right?’”
"All the sudden"?
Ezra 1 hours ago [-]
I think this is an eggcorn/mondegreen for “all of a sudden”.
Seems weird for the WSJ.
voxic11 1 hours ago [-]
It's a quote from a source so at most I would expect a "[sic]". Thinking about it more... it seems like an intentional mistake by the speaker to demonstrate the sort of verbal flub the quote is about. In which case it's pretty clever and a "[sic]" would kind of ruin the subtlety of the joke.
59 minutes ago [-]
agentultra 3 hours ago [-]
A family member of mine did this as an engineer for Chrysler. He passed on a copy of his “dictionary” to me and I’ve kept adding to it. I enjoy a good malapropism/egg-corn. He’s not around anymore but the legacy continues.
Update we kept our practice a secret though, it wasn’t nice to point these things out to people.
NegativeK 1 hours ago [-]
My grandfather was well known at work for, uh, creative sayings. Malapropisms, misheard cliches, or just wild-ass new phrases. His coworkers took to secretly writing them down over the years, and they read them off during his retirement party to universal delight.
A copy of the list ended with us, the family, and has come up during my grandfather's wake and a few times since then.
Absolutely agree that it might not be nice, but context depending it absolutely can be -- as well as a really touching legacy.
HideousKojima 1 hours ago [-]
Had a boss was terrible in other ways (he got fired over sexually harassing one of my coworkers) but he would constantly mess up common sayings. The one I remember most is "bumpin the bumper traffic" instead of "bumper to bumper".
cafard 2 hours ago [-]
A sometime co-worker had on display in her office a list of "Molly-isms" (name redacted) assembled by those who worked closely with her. I did not particularly, and don't recall them.
A woman I worked with long ago was trying to tell her boss that something was "a whole new ballgame" but came out with "whole new ballpark." The boss didn't pick up on it, but after work she mentioned it to her husband, and "a whole new ballroom" became a family catchphrase.
mrspuratic 44 minutes ago [-]
My handle arose from a former colleague's attempt, decades ago, to describe a network malfunction he was trying to diagnose as either (or both) of spurious and erratic in a single word...
dmurray 24 minutes ago [-]
Not too be confused with sporadic?
nehal3m 2 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine simply forgot the term thirsty and told me he felt the urge to drink. We kept that one too.
andy99 25 minutes ago [-]
One of my favorite is people who say "logarithms" instead of "algorithms". It's becoming less common because the term algorithms is becoming vulgarized, but I've heard, mostly sales people, talk about the advanced logarithms in their product. (And they weren't selling slide rules)
Do these articles show up for people? I get three lines that fade out.
mdip 1 hours ago [-]
The only issue I've ever had with archive.* links had to do with compatibility with Cloudflare's DNS but those just fail to resolve. I'm not sure what three lines that fade out is all about -- extensions, maybe?
geocrasher 31 minutes ago [-]
As somebody who had to withhold a burst of laughter when hearing "procurator" mispronounced as "procreator", I approve of this article before even reading it.
Spooky23 1 hours ago [-]
My team did a "Top 10" amusing/stupid/notable sayings and trolls in a year and has a little mock tribunal in the week after Christmas to determine the winner. The top troll got a little troll doll, spray painted gold, and we usually had the best or worst saying framed somehow. The top contributor for sayings would get a lucite award, which had been given to someone who was a charlatan who had left the company, updated with a sharpie and duct-tape.
That was one of my favorite groups of co-workers. Miss that crew!
millzlane 3 hours ago [-]
Not relevant, but was that a Honda in his Driveway?
Hey, keeping your sanity in corpo world can be a challenge. Sometimes you need a mini game like this just to help pass the time.
robertlagrant 3 hours ago [-]
Hopefully retiring at 55 helps.
wvbdmp 3 hours ago [-]
Probably helps with paying attention/not falling asleep during meetings, too. And for everyone involved, if it’s public. It’s a bit like a swear jar.
bell-cot 1 hours ago [-]
It would be fantastic if large non-corporate org's had no need for buzzword bingo games.
But alas! Nope.
lo_zamoyski 37 minutes ago [-]
Arguably, the frequency of malapropisms in the boardroom suggests economic mobility is taking place. The vernacular of those in the socioeconomic class that someone of a lower socioeconomic class aspires to join will be unfamiliar.
Clumsy expressions of socioeconomic aspirations go beyond language, of course. Take the infamously bad taste of the parvenu and the comical snobbery of the nouveau riche and those who ape them.
sollewitt 13 minutes ago [-]
Kinda like some HN posters write the way they think academics talk?
morkalork 38 minutes ago [-]
My spouse and I keep a running catalogue of these for fun. They're a great indicator of how tired and burnt out one another are. Recently there was "begruntle" for what I guess is begrudgingly doing something while disgruntled.
(The transcription of the dialogue itself contains an error, to wit, the use of "penhead" instead of "pinhead".)
paulcole 3 hours ago [-]
I would love to know the most drama caused by this thing over the years —- and how close it came to being shut down.
FreebasingLLMs 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
djaouen 3 hours ago [-]
I propose a solution to this problem: in meetings, make sure nobody speaks at all. Problem solved from your end, am I right???
danesparza 1 hours ago [-]
And people wonder why American manufacturing (and Detroit in particular) has done so poorly for the past 50 years. It's starts at the top. Here is an incredibly candid (and depressing) example of this.
Perhaps if they paid attention this closely to market conditions and manufacturing innovations, Ford wouldn't have this embarrassing example of a corporate executive that is so out of touch.
meepmorp 13 minutes ago [-]
Holy shit, you're right - it does seem reasonable to see this one little story as a valid critique/indictment of US industrial policy!
Rendered at 14:58:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
That hypercorrection is ghastly.
On a somewhat-related note, my grandfather told me that while he was in Officer Candidate School in the Army, there would be someone assigned to ring a bell whenever a person who was leading a briefing or otherwise presenting faltered with an "oral pause" (uh, ummm, etc.) I don't know if this was a normal or ongoing practice.
We printed up bingo cards filled with buzzwords, products, trends, things we thought the analysis might say, etc. We charged $15 per card, all of which was pooled and given to the charity of the winner's choice. When the CEO caught on, he started matching the donations.
There was a reverse version of this played too. We voted in Slack for some weird word or phrase that the CEO or CFO had to say during the earnings calls. They were super awkward and totally unrelated, and the goal was they had to weasel the phrase in somehow. It was pretty funny.
(For someone else in the know, without giving away the company, do you remember any of the wacky phrases?)
I used to take notes and just try to capture the buzzword onslaught. Here's an old notepad cut-and-paste from a single 90 minute meeting this guy was in:
We should sidebar
I’ll call an audible and order lunch
So maybe we’ll put that into a live fire exercise
We’re elbow deep now
I’m starting to ladder into goals and tactics
Let’s explore this for a second so we can put it in the parking lot
Let’s take a bio-break
It’s not on the top of my want-to-do list
I want to get back to some more basic block and tackle
If you look at it as crawl, walk, run. I mean I hate that metaphor, but we’re transitioning from crawl to walk
I have some suggestions around merchandising homepage content
I’ve already done concepting
It’s analytics with icebreaking on the social side
I’ll type up outputs and share
We’re potentially opening the aperture on expert interviews
Out of this decision comes wayfinding for that decision
I’m looking for the exponential in this
Alright, I think we can land it
Brilliant.
"All the sudden"?
Seems weird for the WSJ.
Update we kept our practice a secret though, it wasn’t nice to point these things out to people.
A copy of the list ended with us, the family, and has come up during my grandfather's wake and a few times since then.
Absolutely agree that it might not be nice, but context depending it absolutely can be -- as well as a really touching legacy.
A woman I worked with long ago was trying to tell her boss that something was "a whole new ballgame" but came out with "whole new ballpark." The boss didn't pick up on it, but after work she mentioned it to her husband, and "a whole new ballroom" became a family catchphrase.
That was one of my favorite groups of co-workers. Miss that crew!
But alas! Nope.
Clumsy expressions of socioeconomic aspirations go beyond language, of course. Take the infamously bad taste of the parvenu and the comical snobbery of the nouveau riche and those who ape them.
(The transcription of the dialogue itself contains an error, to wit, the use of "penhead" instead of "pinhead".)
Perhaps if they paid attention this closely to market conditions and manufacturing innovations, Ford wouldn't have this embarrassing example of a corporate executive that is so out of touch.