But isn't >40% still less than the percentage in everyday conversation?
Cbc] First of all one would have to define what is "pointless." Is aying "Thank you" to a bus driver as one steps out pointless? Is saying "Be easy" to a person sitting on a bust-stop bus as one gets up and leaves pointless? Is repeating a joke at a family gathering for the fifth time pointless? (Incidentally, I don't actually even know what twitter is, and have no opinions on it.) In fact, I'm not sure that there is such a thing as "pointless" speech (or personal writing). Sometimes it can be rude, as when someone in the checkout lane chats on a cell phone while the clerk is checking out his/her groceries, but I suppose even that will either disappear or become so common that no one will mind. How much of the text on this list could be dropped with no loss? Does that make it pointless?
AR] Did they do a percentage relative to blog posts? contemporary local newspaper stories? talk radio or TV? Ever listen to other people on the phone, walking past you, on the subway, yeesh. Alan (who's utterly convinced that each and everything he says, writes, posts and tweets is*** meaningful drivel((().
I like that phrase, "meaningful drivel." And in any case let's not sneer at babble. Without adults babbling back to a baby's babble, we would still all be grunting at each other.
And I don't think pointed speech, crucial speech, would be possible or at least very successful unless encased in a good deal of "pointless babble."
We discovered a couple of weeks ago the existence of a 14=CD recording of a a reading of the Fagles translation of the Iliad, which I had been bemoaning never having a chance to read again. It's been around since the early '90s and I wish I had discovered it when I could still also read the text. Listening to a reading of it is an eye-opener. I mention it here because one of the things that comes out clearer (at least for me) in an oral version is how much "pointless" speech there is between the combatants in the heat of battle - and yethow much it adds to the poem. And the real surprise was that I loved a part of the poem that I had always skipped after my first reading - the Catalogue of Ships. Even in teaching the poem I would suggest to my students that probably the only importance of that was to the original audience who would have thought of these men as their ancestors.
But it is glorious, details keep leaping out. Also, it sets the scene or defines the context for the many geneologies with which the heroes tend to decorate their speeches. What someone is going to say is simply, "Hey, we'd better get over there to help so&so." But first they give a short history of their family, sometimes going back it seems to a great-grand uncle who quarreled with their great grandfather, who therefore travelled to
And it all counts. "Pointless" soeech almost makes the poem.
And it trains the reader/listener (if he/she allows him/herself to be trained). I wish I could quote the following exactly, but that is one of the defects of listening rather than reading:one can't put some asterisks in the margin to mark some text. Any how, when Agamemnon lists the great gifts he will give to Achilles if Achilles will only return to action, there is a tremendously POINTED very few words at the end: something to the effect that Achilles must recognize Agamemnon as the bigshot. (I do wish I could quote it precisely.) It's easy to overlook if one is not reading/listening carefully - as is easy to do after the long list of cities and stallions and women and so forth that Agamenon is going to give to Achilles, yet they whole poem may turn on those few words tacked on to the long somewhat babbling speech. The men who carry Agamemnon's offer to Achilles repeat the whole speech almost word for word (a common practice in the poemd: more pointlessness?),but the DO NOT include those closing words.
Then when Achilles refuses their offer (in a rather long but quite wonderful speech) he throws in, not directly tied to anything that has been said, how he hates anyone who doesn't tell the truth and all the truth. No one responds to that part of his speech. It seems simply tacked on. But Achilles, who someone on the Milton list 10 years ago brainlessly called brainless, has guessed the existence of that little barb that Odysseus has tactfully left out. In the same speech, he mentions his mother's prediction: A long life at home, or great glory at Troy but death there. When/if he returns to battle, he returns to his own death - a death in the service of a Commander who treats him with contempt. And to catch the connection, so lightly emphrasized, the reader/listener has to have learned to trust this Bard knows what he is doing, and that involves not skipping over, not dismissing the apparent padding (pointless language) in the poem - which is certainly more likely if early in the poem one has taken the Catalogue seriously, has attended to its details, not absent-mindedly passed them by. And that, I think, requires taking delight in that "padding" for its own sake. And that comes through more strongly, I think, in listening to the poem than in reading it. (That's what its original audience did, of course, but I was surprised that the effect was still there when the poem was translated into modern English.)
I don't think we should sneer at babble, wherever we encounter it.
Carrol