verbal kint (0)
Posted 26 May, 2005 in that is f'ed up.
recently, my friends and i have been discussing unusual verbal tics. one of my friends knew someone who had tourette’s syndrome. when you began to say something, he would suddenly start making a nasal “AAAAA” noise in the back of his throat. you would stop speaking, thinking he was about to say something, and then he would stop making the noise. the minute you began speaking again, off he’d go with the “AAAA” again. and on and on, ad infinitum. he couldn’t help it.
another friend likes to play me answering machine messages from his clients. one of them always ends his messages with “mmmmbye.” he played me two in a row, both with “mmmmbye,” and we laughed heartily. we also laugh at a client he calls “sherry here,” because she begins both her phone calls and her email messages with “hi J, sherry here.” one time he called her while i was there, and said, “hi sherry, J here,” then he cracked up laughing and couldn’t stop. he kept apologizing to sherry.
i knew a guy who would end everything he said with a high-pitched humming sound. “hi kate, how are you doingmmmmMMM?” he seemed to be unaware that he did this. when he was laughing or excited about something, the noise got louder: “so this one time on the simpsonsmmmmMMMMMM??” the rest of the time he spoke in a monotone, which made the noise all the stranger. i thought perhaps he had a soft palate issue, or some specialized form of tourette’s.
i also knew a guy who stuttered. he was in one of my writing classes, and he wrote a really amazing script about a debauched army weekend in the city he called “ddd-d-EEEEEEE…C.” since then, that is what i call our capital city, in honor of him. he was a rocking dude who wore a leather motorcycle jacket and didn’t let stuttering slow his expletive-laden ass down one bit.
my favorite verbal tic right now, however, isn’t really a tic so much as a bizarre situation that keeps on repeating itself. every day at about 4pm, the same guy calls our office. sometimes he calls the front desk, sometimes the ad rep. he always says the same thing. “i want american boyfriend!” he has an accent, and he kind of shouts. “you be my american boyfriend?” every day. he’s calling from somewhere in mexico, the front-desk caller ID says. he has done this every day for about two years. i am not sure why no one blocks his number. probably because we find him funny. sometimes we put him on speaker phone and all yell stuff at him. sometimes i try to get the ad rep to let me get on the phone with him and screw with him, but he always hangs up too quickly. other times we are just too busy or tired to deal with him, and either let it go to voicemail or just pick up and hang up.
two years. this guy really wants an american boyfriend! maybe he shouldn’t hang up so quickly, thenmmmmmMMM?