What language is most spoken in school. Against foreign language in school. Avista language school commercial. Language school in cheseaux suisse. Fun high school language arts activities. Centro puccini italian language school. Sign language school in…

Alternative Althouse: “All I wanted was a Pepsi!”

‘Nuff said.

When I was a young kitty, working at the casino, I once spent several hours dealing poker to a table that contained a serial monologuer. He’d apparently perfected circular breathing, and maintained a steady drone of completely boring shite, to which the other table members responded occasionally with “Uh”. It didn’t deter him, nor did their leaving to seek a saner table.

But what really, really, really made me want to fillet him finely and stuff him down the drop box was his habit of saying “Point taken?” EVERY FUCKING SENTENCE. SOMETIMES FUCKING TWICE IN THE ONE FUCKING SENTENCE. And yes, the experience did deserve caps and bold. I’m sure I started to hallucinate at one point. When I left the table for half an hour for my dinner break, I didn’t stop twitching the whole time.

Sounds like a variant of the stinkpalm.

mikey

When *I* worked for a charitable organisation, fresh out of high school, one of the first things they did was sit me down and tell me I’d never be able to pull any donations* if I kept talking that way.  As I understand it, it’s largely a sign of poor confidence — in effect, you’re asking for permission to continue speaking or offering an opportunity to be contradicted with every statement.

*I never was able to pull any meaningful donations consistently anyway — I don’t have the salesman’s drive that this requires to be done well.

Alternative translation: “All I wanted was a Pepsi!”

Yes indeedy, Jillian. Though there is something worse: here in Oz, there’s a lot of upward inflection in speech, as though people are saying “Well, this is what I think, but I’m not really committed to it”. So I’ve gotten used to it.

However, back when I was a kitten, I worked in a high school, teaching teenagers (a life form with few redeeming qualities, as far as I can see). At that time, rap was just hitting these shores, and so many of the more impressionable kids tried to walk, talk, and gesture like a rap star.

It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than a pudgy, white, middle-class, private schoolboy in uniform, waving his spastic hands about and saying “Yo, check dis…?” It was all I could do to keep myself from bursting into hysterical laughter.

In her comments section, someone called her on saying conservative bloggers were nicer, and she replied, in essence, I said they were nicer to me, not in general. To Ann, what happens to her is all that matters, not what happens in general. It’s really shifting from driving me crazy to just being sad and painful.

I work with a charitable organization that recruits students fresh out of college, and the vast majority of them talk this way – where every sentence is inflected as though it were a question. It’s not a girl thing – many of the boys do it, too.

My greatest charitable act with this organization is the way I refrain from braining any of the question-talkers, no matter how long I have to listen to them speak. Because it’s really annoying? When every sentence a person speaks ends on an up-tone? As though the sentence were a question? I sometimes think that it is because they are afraid of coming across in a negative or aggressive fashion, so they try to make their tone of voice sound non-assertive? But they just end up sounding like a bunch of costal stoners?

See, you want to kill me right now, and this is just text. Imagine listening to it. For hours.

I am a Bodhisattva at this point.

I don’t know about that. As I said on some other blog, she’s like Lee Siegel, Joe Klein and Jonah Goldberg all rolled into one.