I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Heh heh, nothing vague about that description! I'll have to re-examine my storytelling style. H/t Simcha Fisher who had her own example of vagueness:
The time: earlier this year. The occasion: a post-operative tonsillectomy visit with my son’s ENT. She was telling me what to watch out for as his scar sites healed. “You might see some . . . you know? kind-of-thing,” she explained. And then she just looked at me, expectantly.
“Nnnn-no,” I wanted to say. “No, I do not know what kind of thing. Because you . . . you did not say anything!” Grateful to have the printed materials from the hospital, I just bundled up my son and got out of that strange, vague place where they put you to sleep and remove parts of your body kind of thing.
The always-specific Rebecca Teti pointed out this dismally hilarious piece, “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness.” A speechwriter searching for interns noticed
Undergraduates ... seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.
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