Something else that confounds me ...

ROFL :smiley:

Another slightly less drastic, but no less arduous technique, is “hunt and filter”.
One of our developers is an audiobook narrator / producer, with a fastidious approach to mouth noises. He became so fed up with the problem that he developed some tools to help deal with it.

One of the tools he developed is the “Spectral Edit Multi-Tool” (Audacity Manual). When used with a “Spectral Selection” (a time and frequency selection Audacity Manual) in which both the upper and lower frequencies are selected, the multi-tool acts as a notch filter, but also the effect fades in at the start of the selection and fades out at the end of the selection.

In the track spectrogram view, mouth ticks are often visible as bright specks. To use the multi-tool, Spectral editing must be enabled and you must be viewing the track as a spectrogram, then you can select the bright speck and apply the multi-tool. The speck will then become less bright or disappear altogether. A keyboard shortcut may be set to activate this effect (Audacity Manual).

There is another tool that he made called “De-clicker for speech”. It takes a more automated approach to the task. I don’t know how well it works as I’ve never used it, but you can find it here: Updated De-Clicker and new De-esser for speech If you have questions about that effect, please ask in that topic.