I said 'Yeh yeh"'

Do you remember a group called Matt Bianco back in the 80s? They had this song called, I recall 'Yeh Yeh'. I had kind of forgotten about it until this last year or so when quite a few of the people with whom I deal with (particularly those based in a certain south-east metropole) suddenly started jabbing 'Yeh, yeh' back at me before I had finished a sentence.

Am I alone here? Can it be I am the only person who feels on the other end of a conversational equivalent of a machine-gun. It feels, when you hear it like 'Yes, I've grasped your point, you can be quiet now, please don't go on any more, I can't really bear this'. To me, it feels impatient, rude even. I am sure this isn't the purpose of whoever is 'Yeh Yeh-ing' me five seconds into every sentence. Indeed empathy may be meant. Perhaps it is actually saying - 'I understand you, care for what you have to say Craig and yeh (yeh) I hear you.

Or am I perhaps being paranoid? 'YY' as I will now call it reached new heights last week. It appears to have spread to the provinces. In the course of an afternoon,I was YY'd in conversations with a Councillor, a conference organiser and fellow consultant. I know I gab on a bit but YY cuts me stone dead. Perhaps this is not the intended effect?

Hopefully YY will be one of these linguistic trends that is gone as quickly as it arrived. I hope so. Because I have even found myself using it too. And, yes, in just the situations when I am hoping, secretly, I wasn't. Yeh yeh.