Spoken Word

The word/phrase you use constantly:

This changes with time, but lately I’ve been using the phrase, “very good”, as a default reply to anything that isn’t bad news. I think that any constantly used word or phrase is mindless filler, but despite my awareness of this, I find myself occasionally mindlessly filling. It comes with being old and lazy, I guess. I really should be more rigorous when it comes to mental discipline.

At least I don’t say “like” all of the time. Some people seem to use it as verbal punctuation. Even that isn’t as bad as this one poor guy I once had to listen to though. He was an employee of the Marine Science Institute, and he’d come to my work (which at the time was the Children’s Discovery Museum) with a Leopard shark and perhaps another critter or two. It was fun to pat the shark, which felt like sandpaper, but it was a chore to listen to the presentation because the man used the phrase, “you guys”, as verbal punctuation. It was very distracting, and I’m betting he had no idea what he sounded like to his listeners. The fact that I remember this, more than a decade after the fact, is an indication of how noticeable it was.

It pays to be aware of our speaking habits. I try to be aware of mine.