![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I didn't get to the pub last night – spent it all getting a Patreon reward put together – but I did tonight, which was a good thing as I got to eavesdrop on a running club who arrived there shortly after I did. The first great thing about them was that they all had nicknames: Duracell, Fondue, Irish, Walkie-Talkie, Coppertone, and Bag Lady were the ones I jotted down. Also these exchanges:
"There are lots of good things about the Mormon church, though, for example they encourage exercise."
"So did the Nazis."
"Billy Graham must be pretty old now ..."
"Well ... he's younger than God."
Much later there was a small group picking sides in the football league tables. For a while the conversation was the usual numbing sports babble, but winnings came up, and someone asked "what would you do with £100m?" which started a lengthy discussion of debt ("I can't imagine what you'd do with that kind of money if mortgages weren't in the equation"), taxes (if you give money to someone they have to pay taxes on it, but if you buy something for them they don't, apparently), pensions, past experiences with gambling and not gambling, and simply the imaginative exercise of parceling out your hypothetical £100m. It was the sort of conversational flow I thought was normal, from living in Canada, but which I missed terribly in the States, and I keep trying to figure out why it should be so different – we all speak the same language and have many of the same cultural influences, but Americans tend to talk in straight lines using concrete ideas, whereas others wander all over the place and pull in material from any direction, and use imagination, abstraction, and analysis, just as much as recall or opinion. What's behind that? I can't help thinking it has something to do with roadmaps; American highways and grid systems vs older countries' web of organic lines. But that's probably unquantifiable, so a hunch it will have to stay.
Mr Keohane is proving to be very stubborn, by the way, even after a pint of cider.
"There are lots of good things about the Mormon church, though, for example they encourage exercise."
"So did the Nazis."
"Billy Graham must be pretty old now ..."
"Well ... he's younger than God."
Much later there was a small group picking sides in the football league tables. For a while the conversation was the usual numbing sports babble, but winnings came up, and someone asked "what would you do with £100m?" which started a lengthy discussion of debt ("I can't imagine what you'd do with that kind of money if mortgages weren't in the equation"), taxes (if you give money to someone they have to pay taxes on it, but if you buy something for them they don't, apparently), pensions, past experiences with gambling and not gambling, and simply the imaginative exercise of parceling out your hypothetical £100m. It was the sort of conversational flow I thought was normal, from living in Canada, but which I missed terribly in the States, and I keep trying to figure out why it should be so different – we all speak the same language and have many of the same cultural influences, but Americans tend to talk in straight lines using concrete ideas, whereas others wander all over the place and pull in material from any direction, and use imagination, abstraction, and analysis, just as much as recall or opinion. What's behind that? I can't help thinking it has something to do with roadmaps; American highways and grid systems vs older countries' web of organic lines. But that's probably unquantifiable, so a hunch it will have to stay.
Mr Keohane is proving to be very stubborn, by the way, even after a pint of cider.
