JOY ALONG THE WAY: EVERYBODY'S TALKIN' ABOUT SOMETHING

I've been softly singing the title to this column for several days, accenting different words to make a different rhythm and possibly a different meaning, but it nearly always comes out like Dean Martin's "Everybody Needs Somebody Sometime."

The only "need" in my title, although unstated, would seem to be for someone to listen. Maybe not. Maybe folks just talk to an empty room to keep their vocal chords from atrophying. I can't help sniggering a little when some bombastic congressman is giving a great arm-waving, podium pounding speech and the TV cameraman scans the camera around to show no audience.

I am constantly amazed at the ease and fluency with which people talk these days, not slow and thoughtful and full of conviction but fast, furious, often stopping in mid-sentence to utter another thought which to the speaker's mind must seem more important and has a need to be uttered before time runs out. Time for the audience's patience to wear out, that is, or the allotted time slot is up.

The coming of TV is the primary cause for this explosion of fast and loose verbiage, plus the need for the ever increasing intermittent commercial rhetoric necessary to pay for the talk time allowance. One really has to talk fast to squeeze a thought between the commercials. If it is a panel composed of three or four people of different opinions, they all talk at the same time, the one with the loudest voice prevailing or the one the cameraman wishes to zoom in on.

Most media talk is for the purpose of swaying opinion. If a person is not swayed and doesn't bother to talk back at great or greater length, he is labeled an iconoclast, hard-nosed, idealogue.

Of course we are urged to begin talking at an early age. The day when a baby utters an intelligent word is celebrated and made much of, noted immediately in the bulging baby book. Then there comes a time when the child is urged to be still which, no doubt, baffles the youngster. Then, later on, the youth is urged to talk again, in school, in college, in life. If he doesn't he is likely to be labeled a "loner."

This so-called "loner" may be urged to be psychoanalyzed lest he blow up a crowded building or exercise his assault rifle. He is urged to talk, talk, talk. Even when normal people are sad or disturbed, they are asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Although I don't think the primary purpose of the Tower of Babel experience was meant to stifle the flow of talk, it might be revisited for that purpose. If this should happen suddenly during a heated panel discussion, maybe it wouldn't even be noticed because no one listens and everyone talks.

The fast talkers delineating America's troubles speak in interrupted sentences of the need to return to civility. Would that they could be heard. In Congress we hear fellow congressmen referred to as "My distinguished cohort," or "The right honorable gentleman from Virginia, " (or elsewhere) then follow that civility with "has told a lie," or is damn well mistaken."

Which came first, fast interrupted talkers or the revved up pace of the world? Earth isn't revolving any faster but I sometimes think that the law of centrifical force might spin off into space the babelspeakers as blue-john is separated from the cream.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.