Friday, April 1, 2005

“You were a Communications major, right?” asked my boss, clacking away at his keyboard.

“Yep,” I replied as I braced myself for the assignment.

He swiveled to face me.

“Ah, great. So you know how to read and write?” he said with a grin.

“Just barely.”

Certainly this isn’t always true, given our current exchange of words, but there are moments when it’s absolutely valid. Ever find yourself talking without a care in the world, adjective following verb following succulent noun, only to blurt out a nonsensical sound? Maybe it’s because some people interrupt you and, upon hearing their vocal chords vibrate, you form phrases native to IQ’s of 31 or lower. I do this occasionally. Or perhaps you nurse a favorite word such as “like” or “um,” briskly shepherding it into expansive silences or transitions of thought. And why not? It’s like a soft lamb, after all, shorn and broiled and shorn and broiled until the cows come home to be broiled and shorn and milked.

I mentioned verbal tics the other day, a decidedly restrictive term because there is a constancy implied. True, some twitches and hitches never leave you, but our infrequent flashes of communicative disorder deserve equal attention, don’t you think? They are to be celebrated.

Infernal Combustion
Even for those of us who don’t read the dictionary, the amount of words floating in the ether is simply astounding. How on earth do we manage to choose the correct words, time after time? Oh, wait. Turns out we don’t. Here’s a recent conversation I had.

“So you’re flying down next weekend?” I asked.

“Yup, I should get there at 10:30,” replied my buddy.

“Is there a layaway?”

Strange look.

“What I meant to ask was, do they cram you in the baggage compartment until you pay off your entire ticket?”

Good save.

This one was tame. Consider the next example.

All You Need is Wove
There is another condition wherein certain letters are pronounced like other letters, and the specter of Barbara Walters must be untethered and paraded. You’ve got R’s sounding like L’s, R’s mistaken for W’s, S’s sounding like TH’s, that kind of thing.

I was walking downtown one day when I heard a man who made his L’s into W’s. Sentences like this are possible:

“I don’t wike tawking wike this.”

“I’m fiwwed with burning wust.”

“The desire to hock a woogie is indeed strong.”

And, of course, the real sentence uttered, now a classic in my mind:

“I’ve never seen so many angry people in my wife!“

The visions conjured by this surely trespass our normally impeccable borders, so let’s move on to the next one.

Whatnotarrhea
There was a literature course I took, actually took in its entirety, and in the class was a hot brunette. I mean, shit. She was also the type who knew exactly what visual competencies she commanded, and the knowledge was harvested like an oat. This detracted somewhat from the hotness, but there was something else.

Your eyes, though powerfully persuasive, can be swayed by other senses. Body odor, for instance, can turn even the most attractive person into a virtual leper. The same can be said for the aural experience.

See, this classmate loved, mayhap woved, ending her observations with “and whatnot,” ostensibly because this is what people say at liberal arts institutions.

“Blah, blah, blah, Miltonian ethics…and whatnot.”

“(Oh, look at me, everybody!) Imposed hierarchy, allegorical chain of being…and whatnot.”

“Whatnot!”

Really, you’re basically saying, “I’m not only the sharpest crayon in the box, I’m also the tastiest.”

Typochondriac
Remember, our goal isn’t to crucify, at least for the most part. Some impediments are hardwired into one’s brain, and even if you’re free of these, probe deeply enough and you’ll probably discover some kind of tic.

Case in point: I suffer from slydexia, which is an unfortunate malady that causes you to do thing wackbards, though I guess it happens more with numbers rather than wetters and whatnot.