Saturday, November 21, 2009

perils of honest speech

As discussed previously, I have learned through sad experience to be strictly honest. This, coupled with the extensive time I spend doing nit-picky editing, has made me very particular about being accurate and precise in my speech. And this, in turn, has made me a boring conversationalist.

I know people don't generally care whether verbal speech is completely accurate and cited correctly. Indeed, I know that this is generally quite annoying. And yet, I feel a compulsion to make sure that I'm reporting things accurately and citing my sources, adding a disclaimer if I can't do so. "This reminds me of a humorous anecdote my boss was telling me the other day. Now, I don't remember all of this story completely, so I may not be getting all of the details right in places. I'll alert you to these areas as we go along. I should also point out that I cannot vouch for the complete accuracy of this story, as my boss does like to embellish things a bit. At any rate, proceeding with my story, . . . ."

This is all quite unfortunate, because there are many stories that are a lot better when you take certain liberties with the truth and fill in the blanks in memory or understanding. For instance, I could report that the Muslim taxi driver who picked me up at the Denver airport was disappointed when he learned that I was originally from California and not Utah because he would have asked me out if I was interested in bigamy.

But, I don't know if this is true. He definitely said something that he found very amusing about "Cali ladies" and "Utah ladies" and bigamy, but I couldn't actually hear everything he was saying. Unfortunately, this makes for a much less interesting story. And that's the problem with being honest. It makes you boring.*

*Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this blog post are not necessarily an accurate reflection of my thoughts and beliefs.

2 comments:

Chantalita said...

My favorite is the disclaimer at the end. Nice touch!!

This week I've had a couple run ins with honesty. There was the person who was like - "I should have lied!" And I was shocked. Then I told another person who was like - "Yeah, he should have." And everyone else agreed with him. I was sitting there thinking, 'Do I live in an alternate reality?' And that was only event one of the week.

Cindy, I am becoming so boring :) Maybe we should take this to Dr. Phil: How our jobs have made us boring people. No one reads our blogs, listens to our stories or invites us to parties. What should we do?

Hokie said...

Chantal, I want you and Cindy to knwo that I read both your blogs and find them both amusing and uplifting. I listen to your stories and I enjoy them. And finally, I just don't have parities, but I would invite you both if I did.