I’ve always been fascinated by verbal communication between human beings. Sometimes I thought my dogs understood what I was trying to say better than my wife did. She accuses me of not using nouns anymore in our conversations. Heck, after 50 years of marriage she should know what I’m trying to say anyway.
Words like, “thingy, it, that there, over yonder, up there,” and more have replaced specific lengthy nouns and even locations. “You know what I’m talking about,” covers everything else.
I believe when you eliminate words it takes less time to say what you wanted to say in the first place. During our discussions I can even point at things without saying the exact word. When my beautiful dogs were alive they understood when I pointed to an object but it makes her mad. I could even crank my head, shift my eyes in one direction and the dogs would follow me. She won’t.
Men have an easier time of understanding gestures. Look at college and pro football games. The coaches on the sideline make arm gestures to their players on the field. We understand. Women don’t. If you notice closely many times they cover their mouths while talking to coaches in the press box. Men know the opposing coaches can read lips. Men even know the words players mouth at home plate after a bad call or on the sideline after being ejected for making bad gestures. Women don’t know.
This ability comes from a time before cell phones when males communicated by long distance gestures with flags and even smoke signals. Drums work too. Men even have the ability to communicate their feelings of happiness or anger through hand gestures and/or digital motions. Just this morning some young man made a singular digital wave as I passed in front of him on the way to work.
I must say one of my domestic failures might be the ability to keep my lovely wife enthralled with every word uttered from my mouth. It’s getting harder and harder to keep her interest in my communication. I married my wife for her looks but not the ones she’s been giving me lately.
Communicating between the sexes is a continual challenge. Maybe this difficulty can be explained by the email we received from a female friend over at Advanced Therapy. That tells you something right away. Regular therapy in my case may not work but advanced might. They sent this little thought provoker.
Everything Has A Gender (You may not know this but many nonliving things have a gender, i.e. Boy or Girl)
- Ziploc Bags are male, because they hold everything in, but you can see right through them.
- A tire is male, because it goes bald and it’s often over-inflated.
- A hot air balloon is male, because, to get it to go anywhere, you have to light a fire under it and, of course, there’s the hot air part.
- Sponges are female, because they’re soft, squeezable and retain water.
- A web page is female, because it’s always getting hit on.
- A subway is male, because it uses the same old lines to pick people up.
- An hourglass is female, because over time, the weight shifts to the bottom.
- A hammer is male, because it hasn’t changed much over the last 5,000 years, but it’s handy to have around.
- A remote control is female. Ha! You thought it’d be male, didn’t you? But consider this, it gives a man pleasure, he’d be lost without it, and while he doesn’t always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying!
As an example of what many men would consider perfectly clear communication by W.C. Fields, the paragraph below might explain it far easier.
His bio reads, “W.C. Fields was an American comedian, actor, juggler, and writer. Fields’ comic persona was a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist, who remained a sympathetic character actor whose flawless timing and humorous cantankerousness made him one of America’s greatest comedians.” His ability to communicate clearly was always in question. Here are some of his quotes:
- My illness is due to my doctor’s insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.
- Never try to impress a woman because if you do, you’ll have to keep up that standard the rest of your life.
- A man without a woman is like a neck without a pain.
- A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her.
- All the men in my family were bearded, and most of the women.
- I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
- I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.
- I was married once – in San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire in 1906 destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which proves that earthquakes aren’t all bad.
- If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
