There are many ways to ask someone to lower their speaking volume. You can put your pointer finger to your mouth, you can whisper “be quiet” or you can even harshly shout “shut up.” But by far, the king of the most irritating and unnecessary ways of quieting someone down is “shushing.”

Even just seeing the letters “s” and “h” standing alone in that order makes me cringe. “Shushing” is my biggest pet-peeve by far. It’s harsh, it’s shrill and often causes spit to fly out of one’s mouth, along with being rude and unreadable—what’s not to hate?

There are aggressive shushers, there are constant shushers, there are nondiscrete shushers and there are mixtures of all three. Regardless, whenever they do their terrible deed, a part of me wants to cover my ears and curl up into a ball.

Many people are unaware of their actions when they compulsively let the sound slip out of their lips. They may think they’re just kindly requesting silence, when in reality, they are sending darts through my ears.

The real problem with “shushing” is it’s quite difficult to read the tone of such noise. It’s hard to really tell if one is actually thinking, “if you don’t shut your mouth right now I will throw a book at you” or instead, “I really wish they would be more quiet.” This missing information causes a lack of dire knowledge: the real nature of the “shusher’s” request.

In fact, in many cases, if you ask someone to be quiet by shushing, they will probably feel more inclined to retaliate and therefore talk louder. Well, I mean, that’s what I do. Let’s just say, if you really want me to be quiet, you better not shush me.