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An ever lurking pitfall in one's speech is that of mannerism expressions. The wisest and the best people are not exempt from this flaw. Mischievous students, keeping tab on a professor's use of well, counted thirty-seven of them in one lecture. One acquaintance, who has many interesting things to say, distracts me much if I have to listen to him long because of his constant interjection of, "Don't you know." In Ibsen's play, Hedda Gabler} the otherwise cultured George Tesman distractingly ends many of his sentences with Eh. Thousands of people mar their conversation by unconsciously interpolating you see or you know into their sentences. Others interject unspellable sounds and grunts like eh, ah, ugh. All such nervous, unconscious, pointless interjections are scarcely bearable blemishes in one's conversation. Similar to these is the overuse of some words. Some persons tiresomely designate hundreds of things as funny, when they mean odd or unusual or strange. Some keep calling innumerable things terrible or awful. Some girls sprinkle their conversation with lovely and cute more profusely than their grandmothers sprinkled the stew with salt. Perhaps the most overused expression now is O.K. For fear of getting caught with it in my next sentence, I would not dare to prohibit it. I do hint, however, that now and then replacing it with all right would be a relief. Repetitious pet expressions of any kind become either ludicrous or tiresome to hearers. They are also insidious. Unless one keeps a trusty watch against them, they slip into our talk the way bills get into our mail. A most brilliant college senior partially ruined his address to the assembly by an unthinking overuse of naturally. Worst of all, obnoxious though the habit may be, most friends too frequently will rather shun us than tell us. He is lucky who can find a friend who can be persuaded to tell him which barnacles of this type clutter his speech. And |
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