Garrulously Bleeding, Quite Verbosely

It’s time for the world to wake up and realise that it’s adults, not kids who say the dumbest things. Sure, kids ask silly questions sometimes, and even go on to give themselves silly answers, but can you blame them? Their perception and understanding of the world isn’t fully developed, all their life’s experiences have usually been limited to what mummy and daddy think of as suitable, and appropriate, stuff that they can usually look back on with a smile, and think, 'that was fun'. As adults, the edges of our cosy candy floss consciousness have receded slowly, over time, through a cocktail of negative and positive experiences. We have supposedly become older and wiser. We claim to have learnt all these lessons and acquired a smartness that can only come with age. Why then do we talk such rubbish?

I do it too, just for the record. Even I am not above Grown Up Garrulous Disease (GUGD). The other day I caught myself saying to a friend, ‘Oh, I wish my loo roll was printed by the mint, then it would qualify as money, and I could get lots and lots of money for like 99p!’ Prime example. What was I going on about? The London Underground is good place to sample the various strains of nonsense that our minds come up with, although the atmosphere is considerably more sombre than it used to be before the bombings.

Mindless Talk on the Tube (MTT) went into a bit of a recession, but be ye not fooled, it’s coming back. While staring straight ahead, and pretending not to be at all interested, I have eavesdropped on all sorts of conversations, including those where party one says to party two, ‘Stop standing there looking as though your mammaries are about to fall off!’ Of course, party two had no idea what her friend was talking about. I had no idea, before this time, that there was a way in which a person could stand to alert other people to the fact that her boobs would soon detach themselves from her body. I tried to think of it on another level. Was that some sort of metaphor, or figurative, symbolic language? Maybe if I thought of how party two would feel if her chests did fall off, I’d understand why the clever party one was alluding to such a scenario to describe her friends demeanour at that time. I thought very hard about this for two days, and then filed it away in my brain under the category Yet Another Stupid Statement (YASS). Even though party one may have looked uncomfortable, or scared, or hot and bothered, there were other ways that this sentiment could have been conveyed without managing to sound quite so brainless. Party one was clearly a GUGD sufferer whose claustrophobia on the train was causing her to exhibit MTT traits and which ultimately resulted in classic YASS behaviour.

Many studies have revealed that written messages have the potential to be clearer than spoken messages, because writing encourages the organisation of thought. Writing lends itself to being edited so that by the time our audience reads the message, we have had the chance to ensure that our intentions and meanings have been made clear. Not so with speech. When you put your foot in it, the best you can do is blush, clamp your hand over your mouth, apologize and say ‘that didn’t come out right.’ But the damage will already have been done. If this is true, and many people agree it is, then why do we still manage to make so many gaffs on notices and signs?

I came across a bill board in Accra with a colourful ad for Smoked Prawn flavoured noodles. ‘Is it the smoke or is it the prawn?’, the sign wanted to know. I was most irritated. ‘Both, obviously,’ I muttered under my breath. Of all the things that could have been written on the board, of all the creative ideas in the world, of all the clever sublimal messages that could have been employed, of all the possible sales pitches, why such an inane one? I kept wondering how that sign could have passed the Credibility Test. It didn’t pass mine! It must have taken a lot of planning and decision making and market research to get that ad unto such a strategically located board. I thought it was a bit of a disappointment that its message was just another typically daft phrase made by a professional adult. Tut tut.

Driving through Eastbourne two weekends ago, a sign outside a building told me it had been ‘successfully let’. Fair enough, I thought, but either it’s been let or it hasn’t. The success is inherent in the fact that it has been let. My aunt agreed with me, and we had a little twitter about how people say silly things, which is how I got the idea for this piece. I can’t exactly pin point why we say these silly things. Granted, the age of reason is long gone, and we are currently living in an Anything Goes world, but does that give us license to stop making an effort to make sense?

While I’m lambasting adults for saying dumb things, I can’t go on without mentioning the curse of political correctness. It sounds silly when we say that someone is vertically challenged instead if short, or accident prone, instead of clumsy. I read in the Times on Sunday about a woman who was told off by police when she described her assailant as a bald, fat man. I couldn’t imagine for the life of me, what they’d rather she said. Horizontally proficient? Hair Impaired? Weight loss averse? Follicularly Challenged? See what I mean?


Minjiba Cookey © 2006