Mind your language!

“…and she was like I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to and blah blah blah. But I don’t care anymore…I’m done being friends with her!”

As I revisited a recent conversation I’d had with my cousin while she vented her frustration over a fight with her best friend, a certain phrase caught my interest…more specifically, three certain words: blah blah blah.

Now this may seem strange, for in today’s lingo they appear just as frequently as the word ‘goddam’ does in Catcher in The Rye (an astounding 245 times at that), not seldom used by me either.

However it wasn’t so much the usage of the words, but what they implied about our generation that interested me.

Very often these days, our generation is labelled as fast paced and always in a hurry, lacking the patience to finish the task at hand, our mind constantly wandering to what’s coming next. This substitution of the seemingly unimportant information that merely gives finish to a thought or narration seems to validate this theory.

During our conversation, my cousin began to tell me what her best friend had said, but as soon as the basic drift of the apology was clear she was only too eager to move on to her own reaction. She was in such a hurry to jump to the next aspect of the story and finish it sooner, that she didn’t bother completing her chain of thoughts.

Thus, it’s not the lack of articulation that’s getting showcased, but in fact the restlessness of our minds that causes us to leave our thoughts incomplete. We have so many things on our mind at any given point of time, all fighting to gain priority, that it becomes almost impossible for us to stick to one thought long enough to follow through on it.

Is it a malaise? Not necessarily. For a casual conversation…sure, go ahead and use it, but formality and such expressions don’t really go together. What’s important is to watch where we use it, not let it compromise the clarity of communication, make sure the key message is complete, and blah blah blah…