Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Garrulous

Loquacious; wordy; talkative

Slang, while sometimes base and inappropriate, can be quite lovely. For example, my students have brought it to my attention that when an individual talks and does not stop, whether it be a teacher or an administrator or a parent (or a fellow student, though I think this is a rare case because, I've gathered, it is commonly an authority figure that demands a student's attention beyond the attention he or she is willing to pay), they say that this individual is "wrapping them up." The choice of the word "wrapping" is such a truthful one in this context, I think, because it very much enlivens the feeling one has when a speaker continues talking despite one's desire to end the conversation. When someone is being "wrapped up," the image I conjure is one of many letters acting as a tractor beam, a speaker's syllables winding together like ropes reaching out from a motor-like mandible; the sentences adhering to one another and fusing and weaving out from the speaker to embrace the listener like a tentacle; their resulting paragraphs forming a kind of sonic cellophane that dizzies the listener until the listener has that unmistakable feeling of empty boredom, as if their consciousness were being suffocated by the speaker's persistently verbose and superfluous wording.

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