I once read that 'using long words in conversation makes you sound more intelligent'.
I remember on the bus in Year 8 when everyone found out what 'discombobulated' meant and were so excited it was like we'd just discovered helium. Y'know, that feeling when you first inhaled the contents of a floating balloon and felt pale at the lack of oxygen but then when you spoke you sounded like a descendant of Mickey Mouse.
"SAMMY THREW A LEAF AT ME AND I WAS, LIKE, SOOOO DISCOMBOBULATED"
"they're year 7s, don't discombobulate them or they'll cry"
"WHAT DO YOU CALL A CONFUSED DJ- DISCO.M BOB ULATED"
yeah that kind of classic hilarious banter.
So every so often, I aim to learn the meaning of difficult, weird, unknown-to-me-before-reading-the-dictionary words and try to use them in sentences during my day. Because I'm as sophisticated as Grace Kelly on a massive glittery swan. However most of the time these words are so ri-diculous that I either:
I remember on the bus in Year 8 when everyone found out what 'discombobulated' meant and were so excited it was like we'd just discovered helium. Y'know, that feeling when you first inhaled the contents of a floating balloon and felt pale at the lack of oxygen but then when you spoke you sounded like a descendant of Mickey Mouse."SAMMY THREW A LEAF AT ME AND I WAS, LIKE, SOOOO DISCOMBOBULATED"
"they're year 7s, don't discombobulate them or they'll cry"
"WHAT DO YOU CALL A CONFUSED DJ- DISCO.M BOB ULATED"
yeah that kind of classic hilarious banter.
So every so often, I aim to learn the meaning of difficult, weird, unknown-to-me-before-reading-the-dictionary words and try to use them in sentences during my day. Because I'm as sophisticated as Grace Kelly on a massive glittery swan. However most of the time these words are so ri-diculous that I either:
- forget their meaning
- forget what they're meant to sound like
- or forget them entirely and stop speaking, giving up the hope that I will ever recover the conversation
And the person listening just doesn't understand.
That's the problem with social interaction. There's almost always some kind of barrier between people - accents (Scottish people are beautiful but some of them just need to talk a bit slower and stop making me think they have incontinence by saying 'wee' all the time), age (some old people are intimidated by young people and some young people think old people won't like them, when in fact they most likely would love a conversation and often have amazing life stories)...
I recently met a lady and she told me about her life in Portugal and adopting 70-80 cats over her twenty years there. This was a 40 minute conversation and I'd never spoken to her before, ever, and it made my day.
 |
| http://pets4u.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lots-of-cats-gif.jpg |
Okay where were we..ah yes - and of course the physical barriers such as headphones and nobody stopping to talk to anyone like in the busy streets of a city like London. Of course, there's always the feeling that we would be interrupting a stranger if we just started talking to them out of the blue. But isn't that how all the awesome people meet in movies? Bonding over their love of posters of Bob Marley or renaissance art or blueberry muffins or even just complaining about how crazily annoying airports are. I just found out that the bit where the main characters meet in a romantic film actually has an official name: a 'meet-cute'. Hmm.
This website tells you how to create your own 'meet-cute', if you've ever wanted one of those in your life. It seems like everything on the list includes things you should do anyway to enrich your life - travel, ask for help, meet new friends...yeah I think this website is just telling you how to live normally. So we can forget about that one. Basically, just keep doing what you're doing.
If we use long words in conversation to impress people, it is likely that we will make a twonk of ourselves unless we have engraved these words into our brains with an invisible stick...or use long words normally anyway. I think I'm going to stick to things I like to talk about, and if they don't like it or they think I'm weird, they can get lost.
Rhiannon x
Comments
Post a Comment