A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs | Hacker News Reader

A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs

wsj.com

141 pointsCaiero185 comments

Do these articles show up for people? I get three lines that fade out.

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?

https://archive.md/Owu7u works for me. I wonder why this link would be appearing differently to different people. I've seen that faded three line thing many times, but this time.

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.

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

That hypercorrection is ghastly.

Myself agrees.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Your non-verbal communication sent the message.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..?"

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".

Northeast USA, maybe NY or NJ?

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

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

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

All dose poiple, all dose hamboigahs.

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

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.

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

Simpson fans, surely, for obvious reasons.

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

Someone has to say cromulent at this point

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

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

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.

Do you pronounce it as Wed-nes-day?

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

Boston?

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

> 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'?

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

That’s how I read it

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.

20 ;)

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

"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

Also be careful about adding an “f”

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

"My friend and I."

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

EDIT: example:

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

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).

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.

Toastmasters has someone assigned to count these when someone is making a speech but the bell is next level.

I seem to remember there was a Dilbert strip on the topic of buzzword bingo.

She might well have gotten the idea there. This was a fairly dilbert-esque company. Somebody adapted the meeting with a vendor comic[0] with the company's name and a drawing of one of their products. It was used in a lot of internal (and some customer-facing) presentations.

0 - first one on this page https://kintronics.com/technical-jokes-cartoons-8/

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?)

I currently work at the company. Wacky words that I can find in Slack include

- updog

- stegosaurus

- brat

- flabbergasted

- superbowl

- crouton

lol idk why crouton has me flabbergastedly in stitches.

I remember stegosaurus! Good times.

> the goal was they had to weasel the phrase in somehow

Reminds me of the old short story, I think it was called "The Club"?

> (For someone else in the know, without giving away the company, do you remember any of the wacky phrases?)

The phrases from that company (late 90s) are now long-gone from my mind, mere flotsam on the subsequent sea of bullshit.

But later on I worked a lot with soldiers from the British Army and discovered to my delight that they also had some excellent phrases. Off the top of my head

Wolf closest to the sledge / Crocodile closest to the canoe = highest priority problem

Left and right of arc = the extreme ends of a spectrum of possible choices

Don't fight the white = in a test, answer the question rather than complain about it (in staff college exams, the question was on white paper, answer was a different coloured paper, apparently)

Interview without coffee = a dressing down from a senior officer

etc etc.

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

“Were elbow deep now” sounds like Judy Blunt’s description of helping birth a calf in “Breaking Clean”

Let’s take a bio-break seems like the standard let’s take a restroom break in the area I live in.

At my company, nobody wants to have a meeting. They have a "level set", a "catchup", a "touchbase", or worse, a "touchpoint".

Had a similar game when I was in a weird role. 2 separate lines of business had their own internal IT functions. However, thanks to a weird set of accountability/responsibility we maintained the hardware/platform of the public webserver while they maintained the website.

So we had 2 pots. The meaner pot was internal to our own team, where we would bet on both how many users would connect to the webserver before it crashed, and then what the other team would blame as the fault. It was always ~3200 and it was almost always RAM.

One of us would sit in on their publicity events, and present the other team with live readouts on hardware usage. The server had umpteen processors with eleventy Jigahertz, and all the RAM that could fit in the chassis (~128GB from memory). 3000 odd users would connect simultaneously, RAM usage would spike to 2%, processor usage would spike to 3% and the website would crash. We would cash in on their pot as to the number of successful simultaneous connections. Then we would go back to our team, and cash in on users AND whatever they were blaming.

After which our IT managers would have their monthly duel where ours would send them a quote to build a better website and they would send us a strongly worded email about how they felt the hardware was the bottleneck.

It’s been a thing since at least 1994: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-02-22>

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.

> … bragging wrongs

Brilliant.

Same faml, same.

Where I worked last the dress code was super relaxed, unless a bigwig or customer was expected. Made a co-worker laugh once by describing us as "Dressed to the ones".

You don’t exactly have to be a rocket surgeon to invent them.

Sometimes such mistakes are genuinely intriguing revelations. For example, in TFA:

"Read between the tea leaves.”

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it"

- one of my favorites

I also know this joy. I also get a little internal delight intentionally mixing up “classic adages”. I have yet to encounter anyone who has caught it - most of the time it appears to just be perceived as weird. (e.g. people who live in glass houses sink ships)

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.

A friend of mine simply forgot the term thirsty and told me he felt the urge to drink. We kept that one too.

that made me feel like I wanted to start laughing!

I also had an urge to make my belly move in and out in a way that made a funny noise come out my mouth!

Toddlers are great for inventing phrases. Like Eating Store for restaurant.

That is a way better term than restaurant

I sometimes call my hamper the "clothes garbage." :)

There's actually a subreddit for these terms... can't remember atm.

It makes me think of the how "I have thirst" is the literal translation from the French for "I'm thirsty."

There’s power in not allowing a need to define you.

“I have autism” is a better statement than “I’m autistic” because autism doesn’t define me.

Same in Spanish. Tengo sed.

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...

Not too be confused with sporadic?

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.

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".

> he got fired over ... bumpin the bumper

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.

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"?

I think this is an eggcorn/mondegreen for “all of a sudden”.

Seems weird for the WSJ.

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.

I think you're being too generous to both the speaker and the WSJ, but maybe that's too cynical.

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.

Former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, was once caught extolling the virtues of his candidate - he called her the "suppository of all wisdom".

I once was asking my parents to pick up some batteries for something or other while they were at the supermarket, when I was about 13/14 and had a brain fart and said 'Durex' (a brand of condoms common to most of the world except most of America) instead of 'Duracell'.

A tough conversation followed.

My brain couldn't decide which word to use. I asked my mom when someone had moved into their condo/condominium, which came out as condom.

Honestly, without context of the legal system or such, I'd assume procurator was a typo for procreator.

Context: Discussing a first century Roman politician

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.

“Gruntled” happens to be a word I really enjoy using in common speech.

I "could" care less about verbal flubs ;)

Let David Mitchell explain, in a totally non sarcastic way https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

It's natural for busy people in chaotic environments to misspeak. Our brains are doing many things at once while also trying to convey an idea/thought verbally.

It's a side effect of stress/pressure/multi-tasking. It's not an indication of intelligence.

Nobody disagrees, the article is pretty clear that it's all good fun.

A smarter person, with a better command of the language, will be better able to negotiate those difficulties. So the ability to speak effectively under stress really is a sign of education and intelligence.

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.

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.

Hopefully retiring at 55 helps.

I don’t think it does. 55 is too late IMO

It would be fantastic if large non-corporate org's had no need for buzzword bingo games.

But alas! Nope.

My mom and sister both use "six to one, half a dozen to another". I use the actual form of the idiom, "six of one, half a dozen of the other" and my mom used to correct me. I guess I know why she said it wrong: imagine two people. And one says "It's six", and another says "no, it's half a dozen". They're both the same, they mean the same, but it's six to one (person), half a dozen to another (person).

That said, if I were going to start a Borg-themed band, Six of One would be a kick-ass name.

Like Seven oh Nine?

I typically just refer to it as “six hundred twenty one”

A former boss of mine used to say “coopulate” when they meant “cooperate”.

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.

Kinda like some HN posters write the way they think academics talk?

Best comment here, and even made me change my perspective. I have a work colleague that makes a lot of grammar mistakes. It annoys me but I'm wrong. Funny mistakes everyone makes, but we must be careful with our prejudices. Thanks.

I would love to know the most drama caused by this thing over the years —- and how close it came to being shut down.

Not relevant, but was that a Honda in his Driveway?

No, that's a Mustange Mach-e

Oh okay thanks for the updaten

Interesting. I had a similar experience mentoring someone who had a lot of potential but tended to stutter when presenting to clients until they would get in to a flow. What I did was gently say that "I, too, am sometimes nervous presenting to a room" of strangers (usually executives) during project pitches due to the stakes.

So I told them that my trick was to get them talking about their business straight out of the gate (because most people like talking about themselves at that level) and their stutter went away.

I feel like that's maybe more constructive approach.

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!

I think that bring out the elephant in the closet does make sense as a metaphor for some contrasting issue, if the conversation previously invoked the elephant in the room metaphor.

Since we have two big issues that everyone knows and is thinking about but doesn't want to discuss or confront, only one of them can be the elephant in the room. The other must be in the closet.

My ex wife used to do the same thing in her work meetings with a particular executive; she kept a notebook with his verbal missteps.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned that the particular mistake this guy was prone to making was called a mondegreen, not a malapropism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sV3m0pUoM

(The transcription of the dialogue itself contains an error, to wit, the use of "penhead" instead of "pinhead".)

Seems like a weird pastime. Like recording spelling misttakes. Sniglets are a much more smarter way to spend your time. Rather than just a brain turd, they're a placental ejection of humor and common smarts.

Lot of people with the filler word tick you can tell if they know what they’re talking about or just wanting to make you think they know because confident subjects often don’t include the filler words.

A coworker of mine kept score on paper when the associate vice provost used a certain bizword during their all-hands speech. They were a nepo hire because they were friends or family of Condi Rice.

One of the most common malapropisms that I seem to notice most often is when someone is “proud to be apart of the team/project”.

My own personal favorite is “Not my horse, not my monkey”

The movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162711

I have my own subset of mis-sayings that I notice. The biggest one is when people say:

"Coming down the pipe." instead of "Coming down the pike."

:-D

I like when phrases get reversed. Like "better sorry than safe" or "look both ways after crossing the road".

"Mazel tov cocktail" can be no flub!

Every time somebody says "parenthesee" my nerves fray and my hair stands on end.

We had a guy named Smith, and well we saved his sayings as Smithisms in a word doc.

any chance someone here works at ford and is willing to share the full spreadsheet? I need some inspiration

Didn’t he have better things to do?

This makes me question Ford’s corporate effectiveness, and therefore their cars…

If you want to succeed in public life it helps to be articulate. Just look at Kamala and Don. Oh, wait. Cancel that.

I once played a game of cards and it was dragging... and someone yelled out "a quick game is a fast game!"

I propose a solution to this problem: in meetings, make sure nobody speaks at all. Problem solved from your end, am I right???

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.

Holy shit, you're right - it does seem reasonable to see this one little story as a valid critique/indictment of US industrial policy!

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