People Talking

It is extraordinarily fun to watch people talk.  I don’t mean listening to people talk, but literally watching them.  It can show just how alike, and how different, people can be.

Everyone knows someone who talks with their hands—who gestures with every word and seems to be incapable of sitting still once a conversation gets going.  But it’s fun to watch the varying degrees of it.  There are people who just make little gestures, small hand movements to point in the general direction of people and things that they are talking about, maybe the occasional strong gesture to reinforce a point.  Then there are people who only make grand sweeping gestures—hands, arms, and sometimes full upper body movements to really send a point home.  In the worst cases, they just look like they are out and out flailing.  I can’t help but wonder sometime how many passersby they’ve hit accidently in their mission to tell their stories to their full extent.

But even in people who don’t gesture, it’s still just fun to watch people talk—especially people who speak the same language, but have different accents.  While they are technically forming the same words, their mouths and jaws move in different ways to form the distinct sounds.  I am guilty of watching interviews of people with accents different than mine, and getting so involved in watching how they form the words, that I’ve completely missed what the words string together to mean.  It’s a bit of a problem when I fixate on an accent for a little while.  Any visual medium in that accent is pretty much lost on me while I watch people talk...

So—maybe I’m weird, and no one else does this.  But if you have a chance, try it.  It’s likely that you’ll just think I’m crazy and move on—but it might prove to be a fun way to pass some time. And who knows, maybe you’ll find it just as fascinating as I do.

<3