Verbal Habits Quotes

Once you break someone of the habit of up-talking, they can start to see immediate improvement in their careers.

I think it's somewhere in my head, in my travel space, and it just comes out. It's a visual thing that happens unintentionally. People will tell me, "You do realize you just spoke with that accent, right?" And I'll go, "Oh, did I?" So it's not something I think about. As we talk, I have a visual about my speech and it just comes out like that. If that makes any sense!

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

I overuse words. My kids catch me saying stuff. They're like, 'Hey, you say that all the time.' 'Boom' is one of those things.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of 'like' has spread through the idiom of the young. And it's true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

People say I use foul language. I learnt swear words only from my father and YGP.

I hardly use cuss words.

The problem with words is that they easily lose their meaning. Say something often enough and it becomes a tic, not an expression of how you actually feel. Not only that, but words rarely change things. Actions do.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

When I'm sittin' down to dinner with the family, stuff [another Yogiism] just pops out. And they'll say, 'Dad, you just said another one.' And I don't even know what the heck I said.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.

Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don't think of myself as anachronistic - just because I try not to use the word 'like' every other word.

The words I overuse are all adverbs.

People who start a sentence with personally (and they're always women) ought to be thrown to the lions. It's a repulsive habit.

For 16 years I spoke in trial metaphors, and perhaps I need to get out of that habit.

Cath wished she didn't use the word "just" so much. It was her passive-aggressive tell, like someone who twitched when they were lying.

People often say that when couples are married for a long time, they start to look alike. I don't believe that. But I do believe their sentences start to look alike.

I believe that anyone using the phrase 'That's so cool' should have to stand in the corner.

I used to work in an office in New York for this terrible company, and we used to have staff meetings, and I would just count how many times the boss would use the phrase "in terms of." And he would say it like 30 or 40 times. And sometimes he would just say it. He'd be like, "Uhh, in terms of, how are we doing with that?" I realized nobody knows what they're talking about. Everyone's bullshitting. Maybe not everybody, but certainly a lot of people.

As a child, I used 'gay' as a bad word, as in, 'That's so gay.' All my friends did.

I have had periods when I've overused a word, 'candent' being one example, but I'm trying not to do that any more.