Verbalterrupting

The gender-neutral art of cutting someone off mid-sentence, not because you have something urgent to add, but because you simply cannot wait to be the one talking. Unlike manterrupting, which specifically targets women, verbalterrupting is an equal-opportunity annoyance—men do it to men, women do it to women, everyone does it to everyone, and nobody finishes a thought anymore. It's the conversational equivalent of cutting in line, except the line is someone's train of thought and now it's derailed forever. Verbalterrupting is especially common in meetings, where the person who interrupts the most is somehow seen as the leader, and in family dinners, where interrupting is just called "how we communicate."

Example: "I was three words into telling my boss about my project when she verbalterrupted me to share her own ideas about what I was going to say. She was wrong about what I was going to say, but she never found out, because I never got to say it. The project suffered. The meeting continued. The verbalterrupting never stopped."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 15, 2026