You tell your husband you’re going to dinner with your friend Pam, and he says, “Is this a partying late into the night type of situation?” You say, “I said I’m going to dinner.” You say, “What does that even mean—partying?” He says, “You know, hanging out. Having a few drinks.” When you say “party” is cringey as a verb—a balloon filled with shaving cream, a pie in the face—your husband blinks. Says, “That’s just how regular people talk.”
Another way regular people talk is they use the pronoun “they” without identifying the antecedent. “They’re raising taxes again.” “They’re making a remake of that movie already.” “They’re doing construction on Broadway, so you might want to avoid it.” You point out that the effect is creepy, as if everything under the sun is ruled by an unnamable, omnipotent few. Regular people look at you like: And your point is? Your point is that this worldview simply isn’t true. Regular people look at you like: Are you sure?
Regular people don’t bother much with nouns, either. Nearly everything under the sun is “thing” or, worse, “thingy.”
Regular people say, “I’m doing it” when they are very clearly not doing it. Or else they say, “I was just about do it.” Or they say, “I’m doing a lot of things right now. That’s on the list.”
Regular people groan when you point out that they’re not doing it. Roll their eyes. Say, “Well, you know what I mean.” You say, “No, I don’t know what you mean.” Then they say, “Well, regular people would know what I mean.”
When all this imprecision leads to big misunderstandings—say, for example, neither of you picked up the kids from school and the kids hitchhike with a stranger in a faded green Pinto who blows cigarette smoke in your face when you run out to the driveway to retrieve said kids—regular people contend that “we had a miscommunication,” as if this inability of theirs to speak clearly is something you have made together.
You start to say, “bullshit,” but the kids you and regular people did, in fact, make together roll their eyes. They say, “Speaking of bullshit.” They look at each other and say, “Are they even going to feed us?”
Regular people never ever cook dinner, but they say, “We’re doing it.” They gesture toward you like, Right?
