Someday, I’m going to hang out with people among whom I can use my full vocabulary. Someday I will find the people who talk like Dorothy Sayers’ characters (or, possibly, a few steps down from that, so that all the quotations are not so obscure as to fly over my head). Someday, at least, I’m going to hang out with people in conversation with whom I can use a quotation that’s not from a movie or a TV show, and have it recognized.
I should say, someday I’ll do that for longer than a weekend, since I did get to spend time with both Mechaieh and Phelps this year.
The catalyst for all this was a short conversation I just had with the very capable woman in the next cube (a nice blond, blue-eyed Jewish girl with a Native American surname, but that’s another story). I had complained about noticing it was 10:30, looking down, then looking up a perceived few minutes later to see that it was nearly noon. I told her I hadn’t "filled the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run". Kiping’s If, mind you, about as un-obscure as possible. She said, "What was that about distance running?" I repeated myself. She said, "Uh, maybe later in the week. Not on a Monday." Or, for a more pop-culture spin on it, some days I feel like Lisa Simpson.
Posted by dichroic at June 4, 2001 11:31 AM