Mobility
Why is it that with so many many many options for communication, what people actually say is dross.
The other morning on the commute (not quite hell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Virgil and Dante were in the seat across from me, Virgil explaining that this is the Hell of the Procrastinators), a young woman spent the entire journey, and I mean 20 minutes, telling her friend that if the friend left the friend’s boyfriend, she’d ‘f**king dump her, right, because, right, it’s not right to treat people like that, right’.
I suspect that she’s actually shagged the friend’s boyfriend and that this is exactly the sort of thing that comes up during break-up conversations and our shouty mouthy phone fool doesn’t want that, as the last thing she needs is an assault from a former friend, powered by 20 bottles of WKD blue, holding the last two, broken, in each hand and about to try out some moves she learned from ‘Tekken’.
What struck me, other than that somebody can spend so much time on a conversation of so little import, was the poverty of the language on display. I think that this girl must have had a lexicon of about 200 words. No kidding, in her personal dictionary the entry for ‘right’ must be chuffing enormous, because it appears to cover just about every conversational possibility.
I’ve little doubt that to her, this was, right, really important right. I also suspect that I now know why mobile phone executives can afford such large yachts.
Right (!), off to what the Council term the ‘recycling centre’ but which I am still pleased to call the dump, to get rid of accumulated sacks of garden waste. This will be a bit tricky, as some of them have been in the back garden, basically composting in the rain. Oops. This means I’m going to have to try and transport sacks of stuff that are one step away from being declared ‘wetlands’ and protected as a habitat for damp and twigs.
The other morning on the commute (not quite hell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Virgil and Dante were in the seat across from me, Virgil explaining that this is the Hell of the Procrastinators), a young woman spent the entire journey, and I mean 20 minutes, telling her friend that if the friend left the friend’s boyfriend, she’d ‘f**king dump her, right, because, right, it’s not right to treat people like that, right’.
I suspect that she’s actually shagged the friend’s boyfriend and that this is exactly the sort of thing that comes up during break-up conversations and our shouty mouthy phone fool doesn’t want that, as the last thing she needs is an assault from a former friend, powered by 20 bottles of WKD blue, holding the last two, broken, in each hand and about to try out some moves she learned from ‘Tekken’.
What struck me, other than that somebody can spend so much time on a conversation of so little import, was the poverty of the language on display. I think that this girl must have had a lexicon of about 200 words. No kidding, in her personal dictionary the entry for ‘right’ must be chuffing enormous, because it appears to cover just about every conversational possibility.
I’ve little doubt that to her, this was, right, really important right. I also suspect that I now know why mobile phone executives can afford such large yachts.
Right (!), off to what the Council term the ‘recycling centre’ but which I am still pleased to call the dump, to get rid of accumulated sacks of garden waste. This will be a bit tricky, as some of them have been in the back garden, basically composting in the rain. Oops. This means I’m going to have to try and transport sacks of stuff that are one step away from being declared ‘wetlands’ and protected as a habitat for damp and twigs.
Labels: commute, compost, dump, language, lexicon, Mobile phones, recycling, trains
1 Comments:
Your blog has made me laugh out loud! Your poor train companion. I am guessing she was about 21? I feel partly responsible for her lacking vocabulary, being a teacher. Unfortunately, what you don't realise, is that she was probably top of her class!
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