The elevator stopped and the lights flickered. After a brief pause, the lights came back on and a female voice came over the intercom, explaining in comforting tones "do not be alarmed, we are experiencing a power interruption".
The elevator then continued down.
And at that moment, it struck me. That statement, though voiced by a motherly woman, was written by a man. A real woman would have said "stop panicking (or crying, wailing, freaking out), we have just experienced a power interruption".
It involves an entirely different sense of tense.
To the man who wrote the text, it all overlapped. A woman could have understood that the recorded message would only be heard after the power interruption was over.
Afterwards. Not during.
Men are all about Venn diagrams, women are about loose ends. The male perspective is that this and that are on the some plane or in some significant way comparable, the woman knows that there is likely a sequential progression involved. Maybe that explanation is not entirely sound, but it goes a long way towards clarifying why men and women have such hugely different approaches to social talk.
Comparison versus narrative conclusion.
We may seem to speak the same language, but we really don't.
This illuminates Savage Kitten's strange ideas about conversation.
Last night we were lying on the bed in states of undress - no, none of your business, we are both elderly virgins, I am a priest, and we were practicing brahmacharya (ask e-kvetcher if you don't know what that means) - and she started talking.
It was, in a way, strangely romantic.
LOOSE END NO. I
First she started picking my brains about msexcel. Apparently I am an expert, a veritable Rick James of excel. Both of us use that popular spreadsheet program at work, and she had been discoursing about her job earlier in the evening. You may take it from me that msexcel is NOT proper pillow-talk, had nothing at all to do with the golden glow of her skin in the reflected light, and at that time seemed more than a little non-sequitorial to what had gone before. But she was tying up a conversational loose end.
So I elaborated about msexcel for a good ten minutes, explaining how certain things that she asked about could be accomplished.
As soon as I started about programming issues, she cut me off - no loose end there.
LOOSE END NO. II
Then, because my hives were acting up (skin allergy to certain types of tree pollens or air-born exudates), I sat up and started applying soothing ointment. Whereupon she remarked that the black spot on my back had grown bigger, my heavens, the lump itself was larger too! The size of a dollar! And that when I finally have Doctor 趙 in Chinatown lance the darned thing, she wants to be there! She is quite fascinated by it! And yes, she will bring her very own splatter guard, but she wants to see! Oh please!
Please please please!
No, sweetheart, I am NOT explaining to the nurse that this little Cantonese female is here with the big white toad as an observer. Please imagine that conversation: "Hi, I need Doctor 趙 to kill my evil twin Skippy, who is growing out of my back, and Savage Kitten here simply wants to watch, being possessed of avid curiosity, emmeser sadisten-freude, and the spirit of scientific inquiry...."
Nope. Ain't gonna happen. Ever.
The loose end in question is that she has long been convinced that if I allow her to apply gentle (meaning: extremely rough and painful) pressure, something interesting will happen.
She swears it will alleviate, but I know otherwise.
[My evil twin Skippy is the mother of all sebaceous cysts, and lives near the ridgeline of my upper back. He erupted once before, subcutaneously, and it hurt like hell because the surrounding tissues objected to this invasion of their domain by what was in their eyes an obnoxious stranger. I had him lanced back in 2004. The cute little nurse attending that operation in a support function was so startled that she dropped a tray of instruments. You can probably figure out for yourself what role a splatter guard plays in this scheme of things. And thank me for sharing.]
A PIT, AND SOME MAIZE
Somehow we got onto the subject of circumlocutory terms for body parts, and I wondered aloud how a certain orifice shared by both genders got the nickname 'cornhole' - I'm fairly certain I've heard it called that. She asserted that she had NEVER heard of it by that name. Where on earth? What the...? What DO you men talk about? "Hi, dude, how's the wife and kids and the cornhole?" "Nice weather we're having, how does it affect your cornhole?" "Here's the keys to the car, I hope your cornhole likes it?"
The more she speculated, the clearer it became that she has no clue what men say to each other.
Men and women just aren't on the same page.
After all, I never talk about my evil twin skippy. Or the wonderful features of msexcel, which is truly the spreadsheet program to end all spreadsheet programs, indeed, a veritable miracle of spreadsheet software.
Or even, chasvesholom, cornholes.
For comparison, here are some representative snippets of recent male conversations:
1. "Whut?"
2. "Dude!"
3. "Wow, man, boots!"
4. "It's stuck."
5. "Huh?!?"
I think you'll agree that these reflect an entirely different intellectual world, no?
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11 comments:
I would desperatly pity you if you two are actually elderly virgins, or if you just do not often really get down dirty. And if my hopes are to no avail, I wonder where your knowledge of such things comes from. Oh god, I hope that it does not come from that "woman from the bar at wee hours in the morning".
I believe you will find that "cornhole" is in fact a verb, not a noun.
Yes, I agree with the preceding comment. It is, indeed an old (vulgar) American verb and not a noun. At one time, corn cobs were frequently used in prairie outhouses, in the absence of suitable paper-- hence the "corn" and the "hole." [Sears catalogs, by comparison, had more valuable uses in an outhouse and were rarely scrunched-up to wipe one's rear, unlike a newspaper, which had no lasting value.]
A penis inserted into one's anus became known as "cornholing" in prisons, the military and other situations where the population was mainly or exclusively male. The term fell mostly out of usage after the 1950s, though it remains part of the Southern and backwoods lexicon.
While most of us would understand the word's use as a noun, such use is historically unsupported. However, since American English involves constantly-changing idioms, maybe you two are at the leading edge of the word's rebirth.
Bob
Oh,... by the way, as for conversations and communications between men and women, please see the works of Dr. Deborah Tannen. Here's a link to a few of her quotes (but her books should be read to understand them):
http://tinyurl.com/odyqua
Bob
Of course, there is also The Great Cornholio. BTW, the preceding Wilipedia article does us the term "corn hole" as a noun...
Re: Wikipedia entry for "the Great Cornholio". I believe it was T.S. Eliot who once stated: "Ananlyzing humour is like dissecting a frog; nobody is interested, and the frog dies".
Actually, I laughed myself sick.
E. B. White...
;)
Way too much description of altar boy sport here. All of you are either priests or boyscouts. Faugh, I say, faugh!
---Grant Pureofheart
Well allrighty then. Not having been in the service, the slammer, the priesthood, or the merchant marine, I had NO idea that cornholing was such a well-loved pursuit.
Nor, for that matter, that it was a verb.
Thank you all for sharing your knowledge, and please, rest assured that I will share NONE of the details with Savage Kitten. There are some things which felines are not meant to know.
I am NOT cooking in a wood-burning oven!
---Grant Pie
Geek reference: In "Office Space" cornhole is used as a noun. It is towards the end of the movie when Peter Gibbons (played by Ron Livingston) is going to turn himself in for theft and his weird next door neighbor advises him to "watch your cornhole" (as he was going to be put in jail).
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