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book and nine out of ten who won't read it. It is impossible to be an acceptable conversationalist until one has trained oneself to lie in wait for every second and and so between sentences — and has killed it. Compound sentences, that is, and-but-so clauses, are not grammatically wrong, but in about half the frequency of the ordinary talker they are wrong rhetorically and false logically. Actually, the worst feature of the overuse of and and so is not the poor rhetoric but the flabby, chatterbox logic. It betrays the talker as someone who among ideas does not recognize the difference between a colonel and a recruit. It is this lack of discrimination among ideas that as much as any other one thing makes for boresomeness in talking. When a woman says, "It was Saturday and I wanted to go to confession. So at three o'clock I took the car and drove to church. But the confessor did not come until four, so it was almost five before I got home," she can have the face of an angel and the voice of Galli-Curci, but she will still be boring. The minimum subordination necessary to keep those ideas from being boring is, "Since it was Saturday, I wanted to go to confession. At three o'clock I took the car and drove to church. But the confessor did not come until four, so that it was almost five before I got home." |
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