posted 2007/06/05 at 19:51
I'm not sure whether this should come as a surprise given the style of my writings here, or as no surprise at all given what I've said about my personality, but contrary to the long and flowing sentences I tend to write here, in person I tend to be a woman of very few words. Although I add all kinds of embellishments and details when I'm writing -- both here on the .org and in all the other kinds of writing I do -- when I'm speaking, I tend to be very direct and to the point. I think this is one of the main reasons why I have a bit of a reputation for being standoffish, even though I try my hardest not to be.
However, there's an aspect of the way I talk that has become more of an obvious problem for me over the years. When I do speak, I have a tendency to cut my sentences short if I think that what follows doesn't really need to be said. As an example, if we're running low on orange juice in the fridge in the kitchen and Mom asks me if we need to make a grocery run, but I know there's more orange juice in the fridge in the garage, I might say something like, "Well, there's another carton of OJ in the garage so ..." I don't finish the sentence because the final part of the sentence -- that a trip to a grocery store isn't necessary for that purpose -- really doesn't need to be said. This tends to be something I do more with people I know closely, but it's still something that makes my speaking style distinctive.
This has posed a couple of problems for me. First of all, obviously it takes people a while to get used to this. All too often when I'm talking with someone for the first time, I'll drop a sentence off and just get an expectant look back from that person, forcing me to finish the sentence. (Sometimes, I hate to admit it, I'll forget the concluding part of the sentence in the brief awkward pause that follows.) More recently, though, what I've noticed happening is that members of my family will start jumping in on the middle of my sentences, perhaps expecting that I'm going to trail the sentence off at that point when I'm not. I may have more points to make, or I might be coming to a conclusion to the sentence that I think needs to be said, but I'll just get completely talked over there and won't get a chance to finish the sentence. At first this was kind of a shock to me, but now it's becoming more and more of an annoyance.
Given the shyness and social anxiety I suffer from, it's hard enough for me to speak a lot of the time, unless it's with close family or it's in a situation where I have a real feel for the role that's expected of me. (I never had any shyness problems when I was teaching, for example.) With as much as I'm being cut off in mid-sentence by my close family recently, though, I'm thinking that it's just going to become harder and harder for me to say anything at all.
Japan really would be right up your alley. They drop off the end of their statement all of the time (find me a single anime where somebody doesn't put up a token argument by just saying "But...") and expect the other party to just magically fill in the blanks. They think that this works, but I believe it's just that the other party preserves the "wa" by not pressing the issue for further clarification.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon