When Communication Isn’t Your Forte

Do you ever have the kind of day where no matter how careful you are with what you say or do, you just can’t get your point across to people? In the renowned words of the French-Canadian rock band Simple Plan, welcome to my life!

Choosing the right word, pronouncing it correctly, stressing the right syllable, forming an actual sentence with these words, stopping the stutter, making sense, not getting distracted by the sentence you want to say after the two sentences you have already planned to say…IT’S JUST TOO MUCH. My systems crash and I get over-excited with my joke and the words fall out into a messy pile on the floor.

So, lets slow down a little, regroup, and I'll take you through the many-obstacled path that is SPEECH.

Daily events of a speech-struggler:

•   Learning all your vocabulary through reading books = you don’t how to say it, but better yet you don’t know you don’t know how to say it. Until you say the word loudly in a group conversation and everyone goes hold up, what?! Hermione, I’m looking at you.

•  Reading old classics like Bronte and Austen with old-school contorted syntax means your own syntax is pretty messed up and after particularly long sentences people start doing the wrap-it-up gesture. Feedback on all my uni essays was pretty much yeaaaah, you write weird. (Also prone to accidentally speaking in an indulgent manner)(just like that sentence).

• When you’re the slightest bit tired:

         Jonny: What do you want for tea?
         Mumble
         Jonny: What?
         MUMBLES IN AN AGGRESSIVE TONE LOUDER
         (Yeah I know, ungrateful biatch!)

•  Feeling tired and mumble-y isn’t too bad at home because you can angrily gesticulate what you mean (I WANT THE FUCKING CARBONARA), but the worst is when you’ve just come off your lunch at work, you had a big meal, you’re feeling dozy and like a nap would be absolutely perfect. You sit back down, and immediately get confronted with a frustrated customer. In the morning I can schmooze on why I’m sorry and how it’s unacceptable and what I can do for them. But no, all your energy is going into digesting that amazing quinoa salad with a soy and ginger sauce, you’re struggling to keep your eyes open and stifle that yawn, you rack your brain for your customer service charms, fall back phrases, ANYTHING that can stop them staring at me, and your brain finally comes back with ‘soz’. For the benefit to everyone, can we please keep complaints to morning time.

• Spoonerisms happen at least 10 times a day

        (Spoonerisms: mixing up the first few sounds of two different words)
        'I’ve hurt my leck, no I mean my neg!’
        ‘We take chesh and caque…or rather, cash and cheque’
         At Uni my friend was telling me how our other friend messed up the letters in front of loads of fit guys              and ‘was really embarrassed, but you do it all the time Jess and you don’t care!’

• Mondegreens are also a struggle! Mondegreens are phrases that you’ve misheard – I can’t remember any of mine but there was Geordie Shores Chlo'e saying ‘We gotta clean up so it’s spick and spam’ or that IT Crowd episode where Roy makes fun of Jen for thinking the phrase is ‘we’ve put him on a petal stool (pedestal)’.

• Being disappointed when you think of a range of words slightly relevant to what you want to express, shoving them together and the person doesn’t get the gist of what you’re trying to say. What do you mean I have to form a proper sentence?

• Clearly seeing that they don’t understand, and just leaving it to make them think they misheard (I rely on this daily, but my boyfriend catches me out every single time which makes me think ABORT THIS STRATEGY). I also have a strong accent so I use it as a scapegoat as to why they have no clue what I said, when really it’s my incredibly loose command of the English language. I don’t think I get away with this either, but damn it, I’ll continually try!

• Having a stutter-some day and feeling massive amounts of empathy for people who deal with it all the time.

•  Hey Jess, with those speaking struggles you have, how about a career where the whole premise is to communicate expanse amounts of knowledge to 30 children daily? I studied Primary Education at Uni first and I had to script every single word in my lesson. What is that child asking? THIS ISN’T IN THE SCRIPT!

• Also, getting annoyed at the bumbling, dithering teacher but also knowing he’s your future – NOOOOOO.

• Sometimes I think the problem is that too many words are running through my head. I was attempting to describe a messy table in Primark and my head was trying to flick through the appropriate words: pillaged? raided? Vikings? No, off topic. Plundered? Too pirate.  Ransacked? RANSACKED! And then you’re just that girl shouting RANSACKED in Primark on their own because their previous interlocutor has long since moved on and people are giving me a wide berth.

•  Feeling no embarrassment in writing out a speech and a list of anticipated questions and answers when calling someone on the phone.

•  I worked somewhere where I had to make announcements on the tannoy, and failing in using my feminine wiles to get out of it, I finally worked out a strategy of writing it out first (then a further 5 minutes to really gear myself up). The first time I had to do one, I told the customer I was serving that I was nervous, then after they left I wrote it out and made the announcement, and then the customer and his son popped out from behind the wall to emit a very Nelson-like HAHA.

• Feeling in awe when people pull off a difficult sentence with words like patriarchy in, without a blip. How, just how?

•  I’m convinced that there’s a language that my mouth and brain were made for. English just ain’t it!

And it’s not just speaking that’s the problem.  I can always hear what people are saying, but sometimes I just can’t make sense of it:

• Audiobooks are pointless, nada goes in.

• Watching everything with subtitles

• The pure happiness you feel when you watch a film online…AND THE SUBTITLES ARE ON

• But the pure sadness when it’s a thriller and there aren’t any subtitles. Okay, guess I’m in this film for the explosions because I sure as hell can’t tell what they’re saying.

• Crying out ‘BUT I’M A VISUAL LEARNERRRRR’ if someone tries to take subtitles off

• The biggest problem is when I’m at work and someone comes over with a serious expression and you know they’re going to request something important. So you ramp yourself up and get your receptive skills ready. Then as soon as they open their mouth, your brain starts shouting ‘WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY’RE GONNA ASK? CAN YOU GUESS IT BEFORE THEY FINISH? Better yet, can you be doing it whilst they’re still asking? Can they tell I have crisps in my mouth that I’m not supposed to be eating? Are they finally agreeing to my suggestion of changing my hours from full time to one hour a week but on the same salary? Shit you’re not listening, start to finish the end of their sentences so it looks like you are!’ ……’So, can you do that Jess?’ and I go YES and desperately google the odd words I heard to see if the internet can make sense of it. (I don’t do this as much anymore, I got told off too much as a waitress when I just didn’t do what they asked but was instead doing something incredibly random and not helpful but what I thought they’d asked. Now I have no shame in asking them to repeat it and asking them a million questions so I know exactly what they mean and their motives behind it and what their favourite colour is and what their childhood was like. Why don’t people come with subtitles?)

• This one I know everyone does! Asking someone what? And by the time they’ve repeated it you’ve replayed the first question in your heard and understood and can provide the answer. Sometime we just need a liiiiiil bit more time to go into replay mode.

•  Refusing to ask ‘what? Pardon?’ for the third time and smiling in the hope that it’s the right response and it wasn’t a question. Then wondering whether you just missed a life-changing utterance from them.

Words that are the bane of my life:

• I thought Gynaecology was pronounced GINE-ocology
• Particularly/regularly – that ‘ly’ on the end can go away
• Bartholomew took me years to learn how to say (Bartholomnom? Barthfollumnew?)
• Worcestershire/Gloucestershire – y u no say the ‘cest’ bit?
• Derby – JUST SPELL IT AS DARBY IF YOU WANT IT AS DARBY
• It took me until university until I found out that ‘th’ is actually a different sound to ‘f’, for example, three and free. I saw an article on how a Birmingham school was making an effort to teach the children to lose some of their Black Country dialect, and an example given was to stop them saying ‘fink’ when saying the word ‘think’. I was like, well the jokes on them because think IS said like fink. It all came to a head when I told my friend I had seen the film Thor, and she were like four? And held four fingers up, and I was like no the Marvel Viking God one. And then she was all EVERYBODY, JESS THINKS YOU SAY THOR LIKE FOUR. Lordy that was a traumatic time in my life.
• And many, MANY more.

Also, there are some days where my communication is second to none and I’m expressing myself perfectly…and some interactions are STILL awkward as hell. These, my friend, is because it’s THEIR bad communication days. When you’re focusing so hard on your conversation all the time it’s easy to take the blame for any blunders, when really today could be the day that the other person has something else on their mind (did I leave the oven on, did I turn the straighteners off, what is our purpose on earth?!). I think the trick is to not think too much about any communication mishaps and avoid slipping in that spiral of omg I’m such an IDIOTA.

I’ve come to learn that with bad communication days, and the only cure is sleep. A good eight hours to rest your brain and your mouth, and you’ll (hopefully) wake up refreshed and tongue-twister ready. Also, good communication days/conversational quips/big words pronounced perfectly HAVE to be celebrated. Hey, did you hear? Jess said the word colonel correctly today! (What the hell is that word? How could it possibly be pronounced kernel?).

However sometimes bad communication days become bad communication weeks, and it truly feels like every woman is an island because you don’t get anyone and they don’t get you. When it gets to that point, I’ve found there’s a remedy that works every time. That is to get rip-roaringly, sensationally drunk. It’s almost as if my words are catching on something inside my mouth, and getting incredibly pissed just wipes it all out and my words flow.  It clears the cobwebs, makes you a conversational wizard and the effect lasts for weeks. I wonder if it’s because when you’re continually struggling to get your points across, you feel more aware of it and this makes it harder to speak freely. Then alcohol lowers your inhibitions and all your subconscious reserve melts away. But you didn’t hear it from me!

All in all, I don’t mind it too much. I feel way more confident with making mistakes then when I was younger and now every time I slip up, it’s just a funny story to tell later. Most of the time I barely notice it and just carry on blabbing away. I know I’m good at understanding people emotionally, and I wouldn’t swap the skills for the world!

 B l o g L o v i n    T w i t t e r     T u m b l r     P i n t e r e s t  

PS. Words I got wrong even by writing this post in my head: it’s stifle, not stiffle, it’s gesticulate, not gestilate, it’s interlocutor, not inoculators, it’s inhibitions not inhabitions.

PSS. If you got to the end of this, CONGRATS, you just read the word equivalent of a uni essay!