Have you noticed the growing trend of people who use the verbal tick, “you know?”
“You know, I was a high functioning expansive vocabulary guy before I got caught up in this insidious affectation, you know?”
Hooboy, what an irritant that is. I find myself counting “you know”s now — ignoring whatever the person is saying, and just clicking my internal counter, you know (click).
How do these things get started? And more importantly, how do we stop them? I don’t feel comfortable mentioning to someone, after their tenth “you know” that, fuck, would you listen to yourself? I don’t know what you were talking about but I counted fifteen “you know”s just now. In like, two minutes of talking.
I’ve tried to respond, at times, with “yeah, I know.” But then once they catch on, they get miffed. Or, more often, they don’t catch on and I get exhausted trying to keep up.
Is it insecurity, you know? Like they don’t trust their own thoughts and words, you know? Like they’re seeking constant confirmation of their notions, you know?
I won’t win. These people won’t change because they realize how stupid they sound using such a repetitive pointless phrase. Hell, they don’t know they’re doing it. And even when they do realize, the awareness gets lost within seconds, you know?
Yeah, I know already.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
How about the trend where people are now speaking text abbreviations like “LOL” or “LMAO”. Okay, it’s one thing to text it but it’s sad when that becomes your vocabulary.
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Jump forward 10 years and the Twennials will be speaking in nothing but initialisms: “O-L man” = Omgee + Lamayo = OMG + LMAO. I hope I’m dead by then.
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Yeah your headstone will just be a bunch of emoticons…
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[Funny. And very visual. You should create an image with that theme.]
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I’m with you on that, but the one that is really bugging me lately is the ever-present “I’ll be honest with you right now, (yadda yadda yadda).” I had a guy recently in the store drop that, like, twenty times in two minutes. I said “is every other sentence you told me, then, a lie?”
He still bought. I don’t think he got it.
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“I’m about to tell you a lie…” Nope, that was the truth, but the previous sentence was a lie.
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The use of *literally* it’s becoming a “you know”
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Respondent interlocutors’ commencing with ‘so’ make me want to kill them.
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I’ve noticed a lot of people end their responses with “so” as well, using it as a conjunction. It really bothers me because they just trail off and don’t conjunct with anything. It’s used like “over” on a walkie-talkie.
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I feel ya.
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If you cut all that out, they’d have nothing to say at all…
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(made me chuckle)
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Y’know, what really pisses me off is all the throwaway or crutch words in conversation or in content delivery like the news. Basically, literally, virtually, practically, like (not used as a comparative or to set up a metaphor/analogy/simile), “I know, right?” “Oh, awesome” as blatant blow offs for confirmation of input, all the fillers used to take up space (but um, well…and then) because most real world conversations abhor silence.
But, um, you know, like using those without, um, getting too heavy off into it defines a character via dialogue, basically stereotyping them, you know. Sleaze, Valley Girl, politely indifferent Best Buy cashier, grunting bartender, marble mouthed locker room jocks, picketing protestors with their heretofores and whereas.
So, like um, check this out, because with dialogue and a story in a story and backstory as told by a principle soloist ballerina Valley Girl who has just been asked to join an all female celebrity softball team for charity you get
https://philh52.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/the-recruiter/
Practicing regional and subcultural patois, seasoning your dialogue with it will net you a cast of characters as opposed to, you know, the same ol’ shit.
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A few dropped into dialog, to flavor sentiment, is one thing. To replicate, in writing, the real use case of many people afflicted with this foible, would drive a reader nuts.
It’s not even valley girl cute anymore. It’s bloody annoying.
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