The French complain about the noise. Roosters, cicadas, bells, and even their colleagues.
We no longer count them on a daily basis. And yet these little abuses of language often interfere with conversations. Sarah Belmont helps us overcome this in her Guide to100 language tics. The parrot effect, or what we call “psittacism” is to say the fact of repeating something like a parrot while reasoning without understanding the meaning of the words that are being said. The proof, we repeat, is a knock. The tic is the knock. We are stubborn about it. We repeat it again and again. The evidence is that the French are not wrong in themselves. We also find them in the greatest writers, from Flaubert's correspondence to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris. We say, “there you go” and “in mode. Oddly enough, if everyone finds them unbearable, everyone uses them despite everything.