Exactly!

Oh dear...

John and I were talking about how people always say the same thing over and over when they speak...

Like... Shayne always says 'to be honest' when what he says has nothing to do with being honest or not it is just something that is pushed in whenever he feels like it. Can't blame the boy really it must be a bit unnerving all these endless interviews.

Anyway.. of course we talked about what we say too often and we have discovered that John says 'Fantastic!' all the time and I am guilty of 'Exactly'. We have also now found out we BOTH use these words a lot :-)

Taking a bit of a distance and looking at those words I can see that we are very positive people who agree with eachother an awful lot!

So .. what happens now is that we have become very aware of these words which has made me very self concious, it is so irritating that only after it has escaped my mouth I think 'shit, said it again!'

I know with learning (or unlearning I suppose) there are 4 stages:

unconciously unable
conciously unable
conciously able
unconciously able

Which basically means that first you didn't know you did something, then you realise you do but you still can't do anything about it, then you are able to change it but it costs a lot of effort and then you become so good at it that it becomes so normal you don't have to think about it anymore.

Since I discovered my over enthusiastic use of Exactly! I hear myself say it all the time, but can I change it?? NO! I am definitely stuck in phase 2 and have no idea on how to go to stage 3.

I have tried to think about alternatives for the word in the hope that it would then be easier to alternate it a bit with other words but apart from precisely I can't really think of any other words which means exactly (!) the same :-)

There are of course alternatives like 'Bang on' or 'Spot on' but I think these are even worse than my 'Exactly!'

So when I muttered and mumbled about this to John, that I think the word is used exactly(!) right and that I struggle to find good alternatives for it (Fantastic b.t.w. is also a very difficult word to replace!) to which he said 'Darling, you can use exactly as much as you like'

But that doesn't feel right either, see... these stages as described above, you can never go back, I will now forever be stuck in the consciously unable stage and forever hear myself say 'Exactly!' and think 'BUM'!!

:-)