Improving Our Talking Life - part 1

Articles In This Section:

· Improving Our Talking Life - part 1

· Improving Our Talking Life - part 2

· Improving Our Talking Life - part 3

· Improving Our Talking Life - part 4

· Improving Our Talking Life - part 5

· Improving Our Talking Life - part 6

OUR manner of talking is so important a matter, not merely for getting along in this life but also for reaching the next, that the most flaming of the Apostles, St. Paul, fiery trail blazer to salvation, declared, "Your manner of speaking must always be gracious, with an edge of liveliness, ready to give each questioner the right answer."1 I should like especially to call attention to his requiring "an edge of liveliness" in a good Christian's conversation! It pleases me to interpret this to mean that a fellow who never lifts a coin from his mother's purse, but who uses up fifteen and then-s to tell how he talked the "cop" out of a traffic ticket, has a mighty slim chance of wriggling through that biblical "eye of a needle" that is the gate of heaven!

Quite probably the Holy Office would consider my interpretation of St. Paul's "edge of liveliness" in conversation too rigorous — and too demoralizing for the millions of talkers whose conversation rattles along on less than four cylinders and on gritty oil. The Holy Office always has to be ready and fit to watch that no Pauline enthusiast will read too much into such provocative dicta as that "Wives must be submissive to their husbands," and that all talk should have "an edge of liveliness" — or otherwise, presumably, subside into pinochle!

1 Col. 4:6, as translated by R. A. Knox, The New Testament (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1945), p. 435. In the following pages, New Testament references will usually be to the familiar, older Douay-Rheims version.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the most fiery of the Apostles told his Colossians, one, to be gracious in conversation, two, to be lively, and three, to be ready and well informed. It is also well to stress that he lays down these requirements, not primarily to get on well in this world, but to become the sort of Christian who deserves heaven in the next. St. Paul's prescription for talking brings to mind that of the man about whom the world's greatest biography was written, the man whom I tend to regard as a great Protestant saint, Samuel Johnson. Boswell reports:

Talking of conversation, he said, "There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials; in the second place, there must be a command of words; in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in; and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures" (Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. H. V. Abbott, Lake Library Edition, 1923, p. 456).

Here St. Paul's "ready to give . . . the right answer" becomes Johnson's first two points: knowledge and command of words; St. Paul's "edge of liveliness" becomes imagination and presence of mind. The great lexicographer, who has been accused of frequently mistaking conversation for a verbal prize contest, failed to mention the point which St. Paul calls graciousness. But another great English word-marshaler, Jonathan Swift, follows St. Paul in putting this first. In his "Hints towards an Essay on Conversation," he declares, "And surely one of the best rules of conversation is, never to say anything which any of the company can reasonably wish we had left unsaid." In his "Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage," he again stresses that "civility and good will . . . with the addition of some degree of sense, can make conversation or any amusement agreeable."