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Being Humpty Dumpty
Apr. 29th, 2009 12:57 pmThe problem with being Humpty Dumpty is that you forget, eventually, which words you've paid on Saturdays for their extra work.
There's nothing wrong with paying words to mean what you want them to mean, but one comes up against the realization that one's communications are not clear to other people.
Even that isn't as much of a problem as when other people's communications don't communicate, because the perfectly normal words that they used were words that you, in your role as Humpty Dumpty, long ago paid extra to mean something very different.
I find this the most difficult when it comes to such uber-weighted words as "love," "friendship," etc. Most of us have Humpty Dumpty-ed them, and the different things we've paid them extra to mean just don't match.
So today I am a little sad but very relieved to realize that whatever one friend of mine earnestly meant by their years of protestation that, first, they loved me, and second, we were important friends, it didn't mean what I meant by those terms. And I'm not under an obligation to keep treating them in a manner consistent with my Humpty Dumpty-ed versions of those words.
It's only a little sad because this person is a perfectly nice person who's always treated me reasonably well. It's very relieved because I've made my life and this person's life Much More Complicated than they had to be by my continued failure to realize that their language didn't mean what it would mean if I were the one speaking.
There's nothing wrong with paying words to mean what you want them to mean, but one comes up against the realization that one's communications are not clear to other people.
Even that isn't as much of a problem as when other people's communications don't communicate, because the perfectly normal words that they used were words that you, in your role as Humpty Dumpty, long ago paid extra to mean something very different.
I find this the most difficult when it comes to such uber-weighted words as "love," "friendship," etc. Most of us have Humpty Dumpty-ed them, and the different things we've paid them extra to mean just don't match.
So today I am a little sad but very relieved to realize that whatever one friend of mine earnestly meant by their years of protestation that, first, they loved me, and second, we were important friends, it didn't mean what I meant by those terms. And I'm not under an obligation to keep treating them in a manner consistent with my Humpty Dumpty-ed versions of those words.
It's only a little sad because this person is a perfectly nice person who's always treated me reasonably well. It's very relieved because I've made my life and this person's life Much More Complicated than they had to be by my continued failure to realize that their language didn't mean what it would mean if I were the one speaking.
