Re: Mannerisms that drive me up the wall

tony cooper <tony_cooper213@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm having an enclosed front porch re-carpeted, and a man came by
today from the carpet distributor to measure. He entered the
measurements on a portable laptop-like device that created a diagram
of the area. (Quite a slick gadget)

When he went over the measurements with me, he kept saying "You know
what I mean?". Not a few times, but a few dozen times. Irritation
started building up in me like a head of steam in a locomotive. When
he said "It's 18 feet, six inches long. You know what I mean?" I
snapped back that, yes, I know what 18 feet, six inches means and that
I fully grasped the concept of feet and inches as units of
measurement.

Went right over his head. He went blithely on giving me each
measurement followed by "You know what I mean?".

There are other verbal tics that people employ in their speech. Is
"verbal tics" the right description of these annoying interjections?

Dutch has 'stopwoord' for it. (stop word)
Derived perhaps from the use of 'stop' in telegrams.
For that's how they often function:
like a full stop at the end of a sentence.

An extremely irritating one is 'snap je?'
(do you understand?)

Unfortunately 'stop word' has acquired another meaning in English,

Jan

.

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