I'm starting to wonder.
Today we went to a college town about an hour from here. I always find college towns really amusing because they're all the same and they think they're all really unique. I think half of those places stay in business selling the Freshman Enlightenment starter kits with the batik wall hanging, the Darwin fish, the smelly woven poncho and the damned patchouli.
I was going around the little indie record stores looking for a Boris the Sprinkler CD that never materialized and I lost count of how many badly-tended dreads I saw, how many clove cigs, how many baggy alpaca-wool sweaters and how much in-it-to-be-seen ostentatious environmentalism.
All of the shopkeepers were chatty and every. last.
one. had to speak in this godawful, bizarre, utterly unnatural manner. I mean, one woman was telling me a story about her dog and she actually said, "I was seated, breakfasting on smoked salmon and cream cheese and a bit of artisan rye..." ...SHE ACTUALLY SAID THAT, WITH NOT A HINT OF HUMOR. She was
breakfasting, she wasn't eating breakfast.
Who the hell talks like that? I spent many, many years being cranked through academia, in several disciplines, and I would never speak that way. It sounds stilted and ridiculous. You could write like that, sure, but when we're talking vernacular it just comes off as pompous. Aren't people conscious of that? Or is that just what they're going for, some sort of weird faux-laid-back persona where they speak as if they're at a signing, reading from their latest piece?
Ugh.