…According to language studies 90% of all conversation is actually banal? Not a comforting thought for all my students who struggle to study English for 8 years to pass the proficiency exam to know that their knowledge will mainly be put to some banal, meaningless drivel…especially the type of drivel you get from visitors…as Cassandra and her idiom speaking pet pigeon can attest to…
Did it in fact bother us or was it just something we as people did…like talking about the weather or storing carrier bags in other bags. Was 90% of all language conversation banal and if so why didn’t we just stop talking? When it came to Cassandra’s pigeon it was more like 90% of its conversation was idiomatic…and she pondered what it would be like if everyone communicated in idioms. This thought was interrupted by the invasion of their neighbour, a little old lady who lived on the floor below but little only in terms of being vertically challenged not in any other sense of the word. If the Trojan horse had been filled with such ladies of her calibre the opposing army would have run from their posts clutching their teddy bears screaming ‘save me from the yayas’ (Greek grandmothers). Hindsight revealing yet another school boy error in military strategy. She purposefully entered the flat and was halfway down the corridor which separated the living area from the bedrooms, surveying the place as she went, pointing and giggling at little curios and paintings that intrigued her. Cassandra usually retreated when the invasion took place, either in the apartment or on the balcony where she had often been cornered by this seemingly harmless woman. The woman could never even remember her name and was determined she was called Catherine. There she would be on the balcony when the little old lady would pop out to collect a bucket or feed her imprisoned bird
when she would start shouting out ‘Catherine’. As Cassandra was indeed named Cassandra and at no point had ever been Catherine, she politely ignored her to carry on with what she presumed was her calling somebody else on another balcony, naturally called ‘Catherine’. She would also worryingly presume somebody had died every time Cassandra wore black, which led to no end of miscommunications. This time though her brother, the doctor, also accompanied her. He always reminded Cassandra of the Greek doctor from Murder on the Orient Express apart from his chain smoking of course. He had acquired that great skill, no doubt from years of cafenio smoking, of balancing a lit cigarette with a precariously laden heavy burnt ash end pursed between his lips. It swung around the apartment hovering over unsuspecting surfaces: sofas, cushions, wooden tables, himself. To which end Cassandra’s mother monkey crept around the apartment following the bundle of ash with an ashtray in a vain effort to protect her soft furnishings.
So if we’re visiting people over the holiday period this year we should really make a concerted effort to say something meaningful don’t you think? (and don’t forget to use an ashtray).
