A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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

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.

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".

> … bragging wrongs

Brilliant.

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

Same faml, same.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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...

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.

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".

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

Seems weird for the WSJ.

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.

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

No, that's a Mustange Mach-e