Unless they are Bullet Points or Short (very Short!) Stories…
Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. I get it, John Gray, I do. But words are words and for some reason the men in my life have a certain intolerance to too many of them in a row. Which is one thing when you are the average female user of said verbs, nouns and adjectives… but quite another when you are a writer as superfluous with your parlance as you are with your ink-dipped quill.
Why does my husband look like an Italian police officer frantically directing traffic on a busy central Rome crossroads when I recount a tale?
It’s bloody rude and no way to get me to the conclusion of my epic trilogy…. which (just like life) is about the journey, not the destination. In fact his lack of patience will now force me to make an emergency stop, a three point turn and a detour in a totally different direction. Or I may feel obliged to tick over like a car engine… revealing tit bits of my War and Peace style adventure with all the speed of a Fiat Seicento, conking out at the dramatic finale just to be extra annoying.
Words are essential. How else do we make sense of our lives and all of the fun and frolics, shenanigans and escapades that make up our daily existence? Why not embellish upon the mundane? Why settle for less use of the beautiful letters from A-Z that make up our alphabet when we can use more? There is a reason the dictionary was invented!
But it’s not just my husband, I have noticed my dad directs my mum as if she’s traffic too. And don’t get me started on my father-in-law.
And that’s just the spoken word.
Whenever I have been employed by males or worked alongside them, we’ve had the same curious phenomenon occur. Only in this instance I will type perfectly wonderful essays describing the need to ship books on time from Hong Kong port to my customer in Italy for their back-to-school campaign, or standing up for my client in Norway whose recent book delivery came complete with warped covers, translating into a sad and unsaleable mess. No stone is left un-turned in my un-flawed arguments. We’re talking Nobel Peace prize winning stuff.
‘BULLET POINTS, POLLYANNA!,’ a short and not very sweet reply will ping it’s way straight back to me. They haven’t even read it! I know they haven’t read it because it takes me nine minutes and thirty-two seconds to read it… and I wrote the bloomin’ thing.
So tell me, how do flippin’ bullet points get such a necessarily detailed case across? Unless said man is happy to read 500 of the bloody things! Which I doubt very much because they have taken one look at the email that it’s taken me an entire morning to construct and just run off into the stationery cupboard to hide.
Now I will spend the entire afternoon de-constructing an email to spoon feed it back to a very silly and pernickety man – time I could have spent selling your books and making your company profit.
Yes, men are allergic to words. They have to be. It really is the only explanation.
