A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs

Access & meta-discussion

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Corporate games & coping mechanisms

• Many describe similar “mini-games” in meetings to stay sane and awake: buzzword bingo, counting filler words, tracking repeated phrases, betting on when systems will fail and what excuse will be used.
• These games sometimes become organized traditions: charity buzzword bingo for earnings calls, internal contests with trophies, or “top 10” quote lists at year’s end.
• A minority reads the Ford story as evidence of misplaced executive focus and symptomatic of Detroit/US industrial decline; others find that interpretation wildly overblown.

Collecting malapropisms, eggcorns, and in-jokes

• Numerous stories of quietly keeping dictionaries of coworkers’ or relatives’ malapropisms, later read out at retirements, wakes, or family gatherings.
• Some keep lists secret to avoid embarrassing people; others share them with the subject in affectionate contexts where everyone is in on the joke.
• Commenters share favorite broken clichés and reversals (“we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it”, “people who live in glass houses sink ships”), toddler coinages (“eating store” for restaurant), and accidental mashups like “flustrated”.

Filler words, tics, and speech coaching

• Several people count “um”, “you know”, or mispronounced words during talks, sometimes to the point of distraction.
• There’s debate on whether this is harmless fun or an obnoxious habit; one story notes a teacher who dramatically improved after nonverbal feedback on his fillers.
• Ideas emerge around using modern speech recognition or even mild electric shocks to train away fillers; others suggest simply editing them out in real time.
• Some argue filler words are pure noise and hurt clarity; others question why spoken SNR matters so much given language’s redundancy.

Jargon, status, and social mobility

• Differentiation between useful technical jargon (precise within a domain) and empty buzzword salad used to impress or obscure lack of substance.
• Lists of extreme corporate lingo are offered as examples of the latter; a few defend many of these terms as normal business shorthand.
• One comment suggests boardroom malapropisms may reflect upward mobility: people adopting unfamiliar elite-sounding language and sometimes mangling it along the way.