[virgilp]

Nope - neither of them say "shrug" on my laptop. High Sierra/ 10.13.2

[edit] And it "says" them exactly the same, regardless of backslash: "macron, (unintelligible)letter two underscore slash, macron".

What is says is actually this: ¯ツ_/¯

[garblegarble]

Strange, I'm on 10.13.3... have you tried running the say commands at the command-line? My speech settings are set to "Allison", so perhaps it's a feature of the advanced voices?

[virgilp]

> have you tried running the say commands at the command-line

I don't know how else to run it :)

But you guessed it. I have 4 voices, Samantha/Victoria/Alex/Fred. I was using Alex. Samantha behaves as you say, all others behave as I say. (Strangely enough, now it says "Samantha (downloading)", so maybe after download it will be 'fixed'?)