Using Your Words. Well, Some of Your Words

First off, I would like to point out the irony involved in writing a blog post about people using long, obnoxious words in conversations. I suppose it would be more ironic if 1) this was a conversation, and 2) I was using a more pretentious vocabulary. Luckily for all of us, I don’t feel like being hypocritical today, so we can just appreciate the irony that could have been.

I was walking to my car after work yesterday, and behind me were two women, probably a few years older than I, chatting about some random subject (believe it or not, I was trying not to eavesdrop. Oh, alright, I started to, but whatever they were talking about was boring). I bring this up because one of the sentences I remember hearing was:

“… and that was when I started to get feelings of pure remorse.”

Um, really?

Here’s what I don’t understand. Why, in a regular conversation, do people find it necessary to use twenty complicated words to describe something when three simple ones would suffice? Would she have lost credibility if she just said “… and that was when I started feeling guilty.” Do conversations now have minimum word counts?

Now, I know not everyone is good at telling stories, and I’m thankful for that because it makes me mildly more entertaining. Keep in mind, though, that people for the most part don’t have large attention spans. If I’m having a conversation with someone, and they go on a two minute word vomit-fest trying to say that they feel badly about something, I’m probably going to end up tuning out and thinking about how many different ways he/she could have saved time and said the same exact thing.

Similarly, if words that I don’t know get used, then my mind will get taken over by a toy monkey playing with cymbals. That’s only partially meant as a joke… I really do have a toy monkey that plays cymbals in my head. I call him Fred. I see enough of Fred at work (YOU listen to a presentation about nitrification for an hour after not having thought about subject for at least two years and tell me that Fred doesn’t come visit you), so please do me a favor and help me keep him away when he isn’t necessary.