EVERYBODY KNOWS EVERYTHING these days.
Despite the fact that many have not given five minutes’ thought to what they are fulminating about, they do not temper their exhalings with expressions like “I like” or “It seems”, or “I am not taking myself too seriously, but sometimes I think . . . .” Oh no,nthere is an unrestrained jumping in where angels would fear to tread.
A lot of talk these days is like that.
So the other day somebody says, “You know Celine Dion can’t sing.” The rejoinder: “Oh?” “Expert”: “She has no range.” Confident. Contemptuous.
It has become relatively easy to check a number of different sources on something like that, including the views of people truly in the know. There are even software programmes that can check a person’s singing range.
It turns out that Ms Dion’s range is at least three octaves, far outstripping the suggested range for pop songs (and she is a pop singer) – an octave and a third
(“Even an octave plus five notes is pushing some singers with great voices” say Pat and Pete Luboff). Even so, range is only one feature of singing.
(Side note: someone once said that The Star Spangled Banner sounds like it was written by an enemy of the American people – because the demands of its range outstrip the abilities of average Americans (or average anybody else, for that matter). It, unlike most pop songs, is not a song that most of the masses can manage with anything you want to accurately describe as singing.
Fact: it was written by an “enemy” – John Stafford Smith, an Englishman, wrote the melody. Its range?
One and a half octaves.)
Value judgements
Anyway, toute monde talking big ’bout music nowadays. ’Bout movies too. And while speaking strictly about the story and their understanding of the acting, and not considering the at least seven other elements that have to do with a movie’s greatness or lack thereof, they effuse about this or that movie’s worth.
They often mean they like the story (screenplay) and/or the acting (or actors) – and they should say so. Nothing wrong wid dat. But value judgements? Titanic won 11 Academy Awards (including Best Picture). None for screenplay or acting, though – it was not even nominated in those categories!
But apart from engaging in that kind of loose talk, it looks like if we don’t have too much appetite for listening.
Take the call-in programmes. The concept is that you call to express your views, your concerns. So you now expecting that when you call, the moderator will act as a facilitator, asking you questions (including ones that challenge your thinking on the matter), paraphrasing what you have said, and so on – in other words, helping you to get your say out to the listeners.
But what do you find? You call and you end up listening to the moderator using you as a launching pad for his or her expatiations. Nobody told you that this was, in fact, The Howard Stern Show and that you were just the stimulus for the star’s views.
They should still show more respect for you, though.
Beyond the call-in shows, many a conversation is a series of aborted efforts to communicate. Something like this:
A: “I think the Prime Minister should move Ronald –”
B: “You know who I see yesterday? Diana –”
A: “They should really move Jones. He –”
B: “Boy, she get so fat.
I think –”
A lot of crossing of the speaker – and very often for some personal angle. I find that people so love to talk about themselves – how they climbed the Alps, fought with a polar bear, survived in the jungle for eight days.
Now, there is nothing wrong with interrupting your fellow conversationalist to ask questions, give conversation cues or correct something (an inaccurate statement, a misplaced accusation, an unreasonable assumption, a fault in logic), but most interruptions are not of those kinds.
Other interesting conversation habits include failure to seek the go-ahead to enter into another’s space to talk – no sensitivity to whether the other person wants to listen or engage; and a kind of social numbness, in which the presser for conversation does not pick up clues that suggest lack of interest – things like standing sideways, inordinate busyness/fidgeting, walking away.
There are others, but you already got a lot to talk about.
