Verbosity

They call it verbal diarrhea, a ramshackle collection of excessive, empty words used purely with the intent to impress -- the usual consequence of which is alienating people who don’t appreciate undue bombast. Prolix leads to exhaustion, boredom, disgust, disinterest.  But the alternative is terseness. Terseness is a special kind of clarity and conciseness, but it can feel rude.

Terse replies cause more problems than verbose ones do.  How many of us have been left puzzled by a person’s concise and snappy remark? How many of us have gone home feverishly inspecting our actions to identify whether we’ve offended someone and therefore deserve the shortness received? Furthermore, how many of us have accidentally caused pain to another with an abrupt rejoinder – pain that could have so easily been avoided if we had just taken an extra five seconds to use those “excessive, empty words” to give our answer a gentler landing?

For a generation that communicates more than the sum of all prior generations, we have certainly managed to lose the art of politeness. Our Internet-sucking, news-ticking, 147 character feed attention spans are thirty seconds or less, and we can’t spare any of our precious focus or time to just give a little extra to our fellow man. What’s really sad is this “little extra” didn’t use to be extra. It used to be required, and you gave it, if you wanted people to know you were not a beastly little urchin. But today, it is verbosity, it is pomp, it is loquaciousness, it is tooting your horn, it is boring.

To that, I say with concision: GARBAGE.

Near the Mississippi Riverfront in St. Louis, Missouri. 

© Heidi Tauschek, 2011