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The Background for Good Conversation - part 1

JOHN LOCKE, the English philosopher, said, "Before a man can speak on any subject it is necessary to be acquainted with it." We recall that Samuel Johnson said that for conversation "There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials." One cannot get out of a sack what isn't in it. Since conversation is the communicating of facts, ideas, and feelings, one must have them to talk them. The most devastating charge that can be brought against anyone is, "He doesn't know what he is talking about." Rhetoric, diction, voice are important, of course, but one must never forget that they are important not as ends but as tools. They are not the goods, they are merely the express that delivers them.

If the express is streamlined, if we exercise good judg­ment in starting and stopping and braking, we can avoid being boresome or disagreeable. But only a cultivated personality, only one who really "has something to say," can become an interesting and worthwhile conversationalist. Bruce Barton wrote, "My observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind." Someone in the Saturday Evening Post wrote, "The underlying trouble with conversation is lack of curiosity."

To be a really good conversationalist, one must be an in­teresting person. But an interesting person can only be one who is interested in many things. The hero of a novel who found his wife becoming more and more dull re­marked, "It was a long time before I realized that she had no intellectual curiosity." Curiosity is not a profound sense, but it is a kind of self-starter toward knowledge, learning, and wisdom. I cannot help feeling that a person who is not interested in learning more and more about many things, or at least about some thing, resembles a mere vegetation, a mushroom, and that a person who is intellectually alert, who knows what is going on, who probes into things, who is ever in quest of better knowl­edge, acts very much in the image of the God who made him. It was this God, our Lord Jesus, who told the stern Parable of the Talents.

In this parable our Lord reminds us that it is our duty to employ our capacities fully — be they large or small. In this parable, the master gave one servant five talents, another two, a third one. The fellow with only two talents used these just as energetically as the one with five, and though he, of course, never achieved more than two fifths as much as the first, the master said to him exactly as to the first, "Well done, good and faithful servant." But the third, backward with his one talent, had buried it altogether, and the master called him a "wicked and slothful servant," and ordered him "cast out into the exterior darkness" (Matt. 25).

Related terms include improve grammar and improve learning.