Oral Filtration
Freud would have a cow
Everyone filters what they say. It improves communication and diplomacy by preventing verbal miss-steps or unintended meaning. The filters kick in and tell us it’s a bad idea to say ‘hey, jack, you got snot dribbling out your nose there’ or ‘gees, you really shouldn’t wear a thong, you fatso’.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with removing my coherence filter to see where conversations go.
My coherence filter helps me to compose a simple sentence in a structure people expect. Without it, I tend towards really unfortunate wording, double entendre, and wild tangents mid-sentence. “I was in the kitchen slicing cheese for my sandwich.” becomes “I was cutting the cheese in the kitchen.” Note the foul double entendre.
Typically, the people I’m talking to tend to giggle to themselves when they realize the secondary meanings of what I accidentally said. It’s a great way to find out exactly whose sense of humor never matured beyond 4th or 5th grade. Once the immature among my victims start chuckling, others try to figure out what was so funny, hit the double entendre and then can’t help but start snickering.
A little bit of giggling opens the flood-gates for others and then I’ve managed to bring people to raucous laughter.
Its about this time that I actually realize what I’ve said.
Usually it was irreverent and just plain unfortunate. Maybe I chose to verb a noun, and that noun happened to be a colloquialism for something else. For example, a few days ago a coworker pointed out that the skeleton of a dinosaur in a picture was pretty intimidating. I disagreed, but instead of saying “nah, he’s just bone”, I ended up responding with “what’s he going to do? bone me to death?”.
A coworker who overhead our conversation immediately broke out into laughter.
Then again, maybe I just chose a word that was completely unexpected in a given context. For instance, one does not typically use the word ‘anus’ when discussing over lunch how to potty-train a dog. Instead of saying “Buying puppy-pads is expensive”, my brain decided that “its a war between my economics and my dog’s anus” was a better expression of frustration. This choice in words actually resulted in a coworker spewing un-swallowed lemonade in surprise.
I’m learning, however, that removing my coherence filter should be done judiciously. When I’m in a situation where laughter would be unacceptable, the filter gets applied, and I speak with seriousness. But when the conversation is relaxed, and all involved are jovial anyways, I give the filter a break and see what happens.
Usually I embarrass myself, but if everyone else had a good time, I’m more than happy to suffer.