[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

[jaggederest]

All the credit is his, I was just a dumb little punk who didn't know better. Handling it gracefully and making such an astounding change in response.

[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.

[alex1115alex]

One of our app devs built this recently, but for swearing:

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]

Neat! 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]

How should the speech coach stimulate you when it detects you using a particularly euphonously or impactfully?

[gcanyon]

It would be about as easy, and certainly less painful, to just have a video processor remove and smooth over filler words in real time.

If the filler words are excessive it would slow down the apparent rate of speech, but obviously not the real rate of speech, by definition, since we're only removing words with zero semantic value.

[sneak]

Why are filler words bad? Why do we need to be trained not to use them?

[physicles]

People in this thread point out that filler words make communication less effective, primarily by being distracting.

[drekipus]

if you've got nothing to say, you're just adding noise.

[sneak]

Why do we care that much about the SNR of spoken words? Language is inherently quite redundant.

[drekipus]

Redundancy is still "signal"

I don't think it's an argument of efficiency but rather the avoidance of noise.

The "ums" isn't redundant, it's not repeating or decorating the conversation. It's filler like static. Stops people from filling the gaps with their own thoughts

[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.

[HPsquared]

Teams 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]

I 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]

ugh

[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.

[dylan604]

There'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]

I 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.

[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.

[crazygringo]

You can read all about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular

But it's not something to be horrified by; it's no different from how we commonly pronounce "February" without the first "r", or "government" without the "n", or "Wednesday" flipping the "dne" to "nd".

What's even more interesting is that it's only in the context of weapons/energy. The same person will say "nuclear family" the way it's spelled.

But in the weapons/energy context, it's just a natural re-use of the suffix in "moleCULAR", "oCULAR", "cirCULAR". Technically wrong in terms of its derivation, but it feels entirely natural to say, and requires less tongue movement.

It's not due to a lack of education or anything. It's more like a regional dialect, where the region is nuclear weapons and energy.

[fvrghl]

Do you pronounce it as Wed-nes-day?

I've never heard it as anything but Wends-day, but maybe everyone else is wrong.

[ithkuil]

That's the way I always heard it too and indeed it contains the consonant cluster "nd" (inverted from what's spelled)

[crazygringo]

No, that's my point. That words can be pronounced very differently from their spelling.

[bena]

This may be wrong or apocryphal or a third thing:

But I recall reading that this is a deliberate affect used by those who work with nuclear material. Partly as a shibboleth, partly as a means of making the word easier to say quickly.

It came up because George W Bush would pronounce it “nucular” and that was given as the reason. All if my memory serves that is.

[HPsquared]

It would make sense as a different spelling and pronunciation I guess. Like "molecular" or "ocular" or "particular". Fits in better.

[blipvert]

Simpson fans, surely, for obvious reasons.

I’d bet that they love the foilage in fall, too.

[sjcsjc]

Someone has to say cromulent at this point

[freedomben]

Always remember, "A Noble Spririt Embiggens The Smallest Man."

[kazinator]

std::embiggen is coming to C++28, as part of the implementation of explode semantics.

[alsetmusic]

Northeast USA, maybe NY or NJ?

[craftkiller]

I think he was Australian but we were in silicon valley at the time (though I live+work in that area now).

[nopassrecover]

Yeah 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

[dylan604]

Australians 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]

All dose poiple, all dose hamboigahs.

[DiggyJohnson]

Boston?

[freedomben]

Quote possibly, I'm guessing a resident of Boston for many yeahs

[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.

[e3bc54b2]

Now 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]

tangentially, i really like that turn of phrase (drummers among sitarists) :)

[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.

[jodrellblank]

The 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.

[HelloMcFly]

This 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.

[Suppafly]

>But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.

I find that's basically never the case and generally if they are playing some sort of status game, the entire conversation is condescending, so worrying about one normal phrase is pointless.

[HPsquared]

I 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".

[whstl]

Some cultures or regions use the word "basically" more frequently than others. And if there one thing I don't want to do is judging whole populations because of the way they traditionally use the language.

[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