Hyperbole
Out of context: Reply #7
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- Muncher2
On another tangent, but prompted by Detritus' 'Hyperbole x girlfriend x esteem' anecdote...
When I was about 16 I met a girl at a pub who was firstly gorgeous, and secondly seemed to me to have all the sophistication and maturity of a posh middle aged woman. She was only 18 years old but to find yourself in with a chance of having a grown-up as a girlfriend when you've only just left school and sprung a few pubes was like winning the lottery.
So I was seeing this 18 year old, and she was very different to me. She lived in a posh house out in the countryside, had her own car, and was studying at college with a view to university and then on to higher plain of life as a wealthy intellectual in a lovely oak-lined apartment amongst other intellectual multi-millionaires. By contrast I had come from a tiny working class hovel, had flunked school, was on a government program designed to give futureless scum something to aim for, and I aspired one day to have council-provided accommodation and a cool tracksuit. We were very different, but I was doing my best to hide that fact.
So anyway we'd been on a few dates and were an item. We had experienced some form of sexual exchange in her car, which was an Austin Mini so not ergonomically suited to sexual activity, and we'd had lots of deep meaningful chats. About literary stuff. At that point in my life the last book I'd read was Biggles, when I was eight.
She was really into literature and reading though, and I really felt out of my depth. So I was winging it and blagging it as much as I could so as far as she knew at that point in proceedings, I had read everything she ever referred to. I seemed to have got away with it. Mainly because she liked to do all the talking, so all I had to do was agree and look knowledgeable. "ah yes, good point. Excellent analogy" and so on.
Then we were driving along in her car somewhere and she was talking about hi-falutin' intellectual stuff I had no idea about and then she mentioned "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" so I did my usual "Ah, yes, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, are you reading that now?... what do you think of it?" and she had said, excitedly "Why, have you read that too then?" (and each time I had answered "yes I have" to one of these literary questions she had swooned a bit more because she had found somebody as well read as she was), so I had said "Yes, of course I've read it", adding "it's a classic" and hoping that it was.
But then she started asking me something about it... the structure of the sub-plot or the allegorical allusions of something or other... I don't know... and I suddenly realised she wanted to know my thoughts this time, so I tried to answer, and after a nano-second of panic I confidently mentioned something about the pursuit of the animal.
She looked a little confused and said "What do you mean the pursuit of the animal?... I don't understand the allegory you are proposing" or some such, so I quickly embellished by saying "Well, I don't think the dog actually exists, I think they are being haunted by something else, or somebody else, and they only think it's a dog which is why they can't solve the case".
And she said "There are no dogs in Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and she looked really very confused, as though she was becoming vaguely aware that she was standing inside a total fabrication that she had willingly helped construct around me.
And I realised in that same moment that it's not possible to borrow some vague knowledge of one story and expect to use it to suggest knowledge about an entirely different one, but despite this I grasped for a final life-saving get-out and said "Oh right yes, I read it years ago... and I think I'm confusing it with The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is also a classic".
Which I also hadn't read, I'd just seen a bit of it on TV once.
We split up very quickly after that.