Improving Our Talking Life : Page 18

Being a college teacher myself, I tended in my talking life to act accordingly. However, two observations slowly forced themselves upon me. One was that some of the greatest bores in the world can be found among the "intellectuals," so that evidently it was not brains and learning alone that made the conversationalist. The other was that the conversation of the "intellectuals," even when lively, seems to be far more about groceries and matrimony than about lyrics and existentialism. While, it is true, the conversations that were most memorable for me personally were those mostly about cultural and intellectual topics, the post-mortem of the normally interesting conversations of cultured or educated persons tended to show that they were some 90 per cent about