Adriaen van Ostade: Man and Woman Talking (17th century)

"It's a sincere form of caring to keep nodding rather than merely nodding off."

As The Muse assimilates into her new career as a Port Commissioner, her ArmCandy gets to learn previously unimaginable dialects. He had grown accustomed to her speaking in alien tongues when she signed on to work with the Biofuels program in The Department of Energy in DC fifteen years before. Learning the various terms and acronyms she began tossing around from day one was a bit of a chore. He knew his job was to help talk her down from whatever ledge her new job responsibilities had left her hanging from, even on those too-frequent three-gimlet evenings. He would listen as if he understood and grew to think himself awfully good at pretending to understand. He would occasionally toss in an innocent question and ask for a translation into generally accepted English, but usually just accepted as gibberish what seemed to hold such deep significance for her. Spouses have done no less throughout history.

Every profession carries its unique dialect. Even when the words and pronunciations remain stable, the meanings ramble all over creation. This holds even within departments and levels within individual organizations. The dialect the executives speak hardly resembles the ones spoken on the loading dock or shop floor. The primary means of determining whether someone belongs lies in their facility with the local use of language. Talking the talk defines walking the walk.

Long ago, I learned how to read specialized material. I simply switch off my need to understand the content. I can almost always discern the parts of speech and thereby manage a grammatical understanding of any written material. I might not be able to translate the meaning of those specialized nouns, but I can damned well tell a noun from a verb and comprehend accordingly. Once I suspend my usual need to understand the meanings of those alien terms, I can listen and even comprehend the contextual message within the material. I perform a similar trick when absorbing The Muse's recounting of some pressing issues in her work. It's always some variant of some quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog, with brown reliably switched out for some acronym and the dog some engineering technique currently undergoing beta testing. I could nod knowingly without necessarily nodding off, and all would be right with the world right up to and even including that third gimlet.

I'm older and wiser now, and my internal dialogue notices this latest shift. She's carried over some of the dialects she absorbed while working at the lab, but now she's incorporating a few concepts apparently unique to governance. It's a dance for me. She leads, and I more or less willingly follow. I understand this time that I need never actually master the dialect; I just need to learn how to respect it. It's all in the parsing. I daren't lose my patience or signal boredom, for this new context seems very important to her, and I have nothing to gain from neglecting to engage and everything to lose. It would be an abuse of my responsibilities to learn this new language, but at all costs, I must continue blithely parsing just as if I understood. It's a sincere form of caring to keep nodding rather than merely nodding off. She will continue ShopTalking until long after the end of her six-year term. I might even learn something in the process.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz