Another ex colleague who I caught up with recently stills says “and so on and so forth” in virtually every sentence. I had a candidate recently who repeated “and whatnot” countless times in an interview. She got the job so I wasn’t too worried but it took all my self-control not to point it out.

Are these verbal tics so bad? Probably not but we all have our pet words and sentence fillers ranging from “um” to “like” to “you know what I mean”. It’s probably not a bad thing to be conscious of our vocabulary and the phrases we use. It may be helpful to get some feedback from trusted ones and conduct a bit of a word audit, especially if you are going to interviews and whatnot.

Rupert Harvey​