20190829.0430

I've noted a propensity towards being long-winded, towards waxing verbose about things that most would regard as being simple. It's something I've seen attributed to those who work in the humanities and those who dabble in them despite repeated failed attempts to enter one of the few lines of work that make a living (increasingly poorly and tenuously) at doing so, and it's not incorrect or inaccurate to make such an attribution. It is, however, incorrect and inaccurate to assign the attribution solely or primarily to such people; it is something of which most folks are guilty, and with things as seemingly "trivial" as the work of the humanities.
It's a thing I've often encountered with students as I've taught writing across many years, now, that they claim they want only to say what needs saying and move on. (That so many of them as do pad out their prose with trite and cliché phrasing, while not offering details that would be helpful or explaining the details, suggests that the claim is not sincere.) Yet I note that they do not scruple to go on at length, mouth to ear, about any number of things that may or may not be of more importance in the wider world than what I urge them to treat in their writing. (I do push them to do more than jump through the hoops of the assignments, though most, given where I teach and what their goals are for their curricula, only seek to jump through the hoops--not always successfully.) And they do so with fellow students who may not have been interested in the subject matter previously, who would have had little reason to be expected to be interested in it.
Clearly, then, being long-winded is not a bad thing in itself. Yet it seems to be condemned in people like me as we talk about the things we tend to discuss. And it is not restricted to the teacher-student relationship, which is often figured as antagonistic and, as a relationship of uneven power dynamic, can be understood to provoke some resistance in itself. On those rare occasions when I am out among other adults who aren't relatives, in some situation that's not work, I find myself going on over-much about my interests and work, while trivia receive rapt attention despite being bruited about for longer and with fewer gaps.
I should not be surprised at it; I should not ever be surprised at it. I know that I am strange for the things I like and enjoy, stranger still for making a study of them, and even stranger for having made an attempt to make it my professional life. And I have long known it, sometimes in bruises on my body. Those have faded, and they have not been renewed for the most part, but I still find myself tender to certain touches that I ought perhaps to have hardened myself against long since.