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The Mechanics and Rhetoric of Conversation - part 7
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But at this point it is important to stress that if an expression, an imaginative comparison, is not unfair, hurtful, or coarse, it may be a most effective device for giving our talk the "edge of liveliness" St. Paul wants. It may be the best way to put things in a new light. Poetry, for example, consists of clothing an idea or ideal in an apt and warm comparison which our sense can realize more quickly than the ideal literally expressed. Our Lord in this manner compares a sinner to a lost sheep; Tennyson compares dying to crossing the bar; Holmes compares an old man to the last leaf upon the tree. You can easily see that the linguistic device in this and calling an unpopular girl a wallflower or an unrelenting scholar a bookworm is identical. The difference lies in the spirit behind the expression, the
graciousness which motivates it, and the good taste and beauty which envelop it.
It must, therefore, be stated emphatically that man's highest linguistic device for making ideas lively and beautiful, constituting the power of literature, must also characterize all superior conversation. A good talker will not avoid such figurativeness; he will seek it, he will try to create it. When Goldsmith told Johnson that if he wrote a fable of fishes, the mighty lexicographer would make his goldfish talk like whales, he eloquently soared into this poetic method. But so too does the fellow who speaks of a whale of a laugh. It is also to be noted that in ordinary conversation such suggestive expressions need not and should not be quite as ethereal or flowery as in poetry. Conversation is colloquial and may have a tang of earth. In ordinary talk, for example, speaking of milk as ambrosia, unless in jest, would be too dainty. While again, calling it as college people often do, cow juice or moo juice is unacceptable because it degrades a wholesome food, yet calling it arrested ice cream or coffee bleacher would be enlivening and picturesque. The tendency and ability to invent and use various comparisons and suggestions in place of the literal name of things is the mark of every really superior conversationalist, just as it is the stock-in-trade of every true writer. However, the successful use of this device is so much a matter of high imaginative talent that not many can be helped to shine in it, but everybody can learn to appreciate and encourage it. Just as good poetry is quoted by millions who do not write it, so a conversationalist may well use the apt figures he has heard or learned elsewhere, if only he is careful not to drool them into a groove. Those who cannot invent original expressions of this sort may be consoled to realize that they can be acceptable, if not brilliant, talkers, without them. But there are several rhetorical matters without which one cannot achieve St. Paul's requisite edge of liveliness. A good conversationalist must get away from over-coordination and overgeneralization. At the beginning of this chapter I related how my pastor regretted my continuous boyish use of and then in telling a story. That was over-coordination. It is the tendency of all children and all untrained or unthinking people. They tend to string together all of their ideas, heavyweight and featherweight alike, in simple and in compound sentences. They should, of course, put only their heavyweight ideas into main clauses (simple or compound sentences), while their featherweight ideas should be in phrases or in the subordinate clause of a complex sentence. Instead of saying, "After I had finally parked the car, I started looking for the hardware store," they say, "I parked the car, and then I looked for the hardware store." The constant use of and or so between main clauses, one of which should really be reduced to a clause beginning with after or because or when, is the besetting vice of eight out of ten who read this book and nine out of ten who won't read it. It is impossible to be an acceptable conversationalist until one has trained oneself to lie in wait for every second and and so between sentences — and has killed it. Compound sentences, that is, and-but-so clauses, are not grammatically wrong, but in about half the frequency of the ordinary talker they are wrong rhetorically and false logically.
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