AKA: Do We Talk Like That?
our words in the sight of God."
Conversation as I understand it to be, is supposed to be a participant sport for the enjoyment and illumination of all who are involved in it. It's the mutual exchanging of ideas and thoughts between people where they take turns speaking and listening. But have you noticed how often that a conversation seems to get turned around to become a spectators sport where the rest of us end up listening to what one person wants to talk about? And haven't you also noticed that what they usually want to talk about is themselves? Their "hidden agenda" in every conversation is always "me". Somehow or other they seem to always be the main character in every story they tell.
"I just spent 25 minutes on the phone with an energy sucker. These are the people who call you up and prattle on and on about nothing, while you, being too stupidly polite to shout "shut up--you're boring my eyelashes off," just sit there and listen, and all the while you can feel your energy being sucked through your ear, out the telephone---through the lines and into this person's body. So now they've got their energy and yours too, so they just keep going and going and going. Pretty soon, you look and feel like a raisin with all the juice--shhlup--sucked right out of you. Know what I mean?"---Unfortunately, for many of us the answer is a resounding, yes!
One of the great arts of living is the art of listening.
We are told by communicators that our speaking is one of the most influential things we will ever be doing. That it's important that we always express ourselves with speech that can be understood by the listener. As a minister, I've learned the value of this statement, but it presents a real problem with those speaking today's conversational language. It's loaded with sloppy phrases, far out words and meaningless expressions that makes it difficult to understand what it is they are saying.
One of the phrases that is commonly used by those trying to express themselves are the words, "you know." Some people use these words the same way a writer would use a comma. Recently, in a post game interview that I was watching on TV., the sport's personality being interviewed used the words, "you know...you know...you know," so many times that even the interviewer lost interest and turned to someone else. The player was awesome carrying the football but awful at conversing.
Today's "you know" has become a substitute for yesterdays drawn out "andaaa" that people use to sprinkle in their sentences to fill in time while they thought of what they wanted to say next. This prevented others from taking over the conversation before they were ready to relinquish control. The words, "you know" like the word "andaaa" has allowed people to keep on talking when they should have stopped some time before and started listening.
The "you knowers" take for granted and assume that others understand what it is that they are trying to communicate when they talk. Since they are sure "you know," then they don't have to bother explaining it with more details. More often than not though, we don't know and we do need details. In a generation that is being "you knowed" to death, we cannot keep assuming that people always know what it is one is really saying. Could it be possible that a previous generation of "you knowers" prompted the saying that "a picture is worth 10,000 words?" Maybe!