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The Background for Good Conversation - part
3
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That is the key to conversational background: one reads it, hears it, or sees it — whatever explains or describes man and his world and all that creeps, swims, and grows in it. Where one gets it does not matter, but if one has much of it, one has the background for good conversation.
The first symptom of a good conversationalist is that he knows a lot about
his own vocation. He knows not only its skill, but also its history and
lore. In Dallas, Texas, on the direct route to Little Rock, I asked a
gasoline vendor the distance to the latter place. He did not know. Offering
to look it up, he was overheard by another attendant, who said, "It's 340
miles. You'll be going through Texarkana, halfway between. There you will be farther from El Paso than from Chicago." He knew not only the price of gasoline at his station, but also his geography. A good conversationalist can always be depended upon to know a lot of assorted facts about his job, his place of work, and his associates.
Avocations are excellent suppliers of conversational material. A plumber who is a gardener on the side is more interesting than one who knows only pipes and wrenches. Every avocation enlarges one's vocabulary, widens one's circle of friends, and enriches one's personality. The founder of the Catholic University physics department, the late Dr. Daniel W. Shea, had made birds his avocation. I remember how surprised and thrilled I was during a trip through New England to come upon him in his summer home in Maine, observing and writing about birds. It made him much more interesting for me than any restricted physicist, no matter how atomic, could have been! A salesman who sings in a quartette, and a bookkeeper who plays the choir organ are, all other things being equal, more interesting to talk with than those who don't have such avocations.
One of the most interesting men I remember was a goateed cotton dealer in San Francisco. When I first noticed him at a Holy Name meeting, I did not guess that I should ever want to know him better. But during the social hour someone asked him to recite some Shakespeare. To my astonishment, he got up and rendered Hamlet's "To be or not to be," and Jaques' "All the world's a stage." It seems he had enriched his cotton-trading life by making the reading and memorizing of Shakespeare an avocation. He proved to be the most interesting member of our Holy Name Society in that San Francisco parish, the only one whom I will never forget.
Similar to avocations are hobbies. Almost any hobby makes a person more interesting as a talker. During one financially harried semester in high school, I was a stamp collector. This dip into philatelism, while it made my parents investigate my sudden extravagance, has a thousand times given me conversational bonds with people when no other common ground had yet been reached. It also made me forever capable of understanding and sympathizing with the collector's urge that "afflicts" so large a portion of mankind! A hobby is not essential for good conversation, but in the absence of a weightier interest, it does agreeably undergird it.
Related terms include improve english language and improve english speaking skills.
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