Thursday, September 2, 2010
Vague Sentence
After reading Chapter 2 in Epstein, I was amazed at how many people, including myself, consistently use vague sentences. In many conversations I have found myself confused as to what the other person meant in their statements, since it was too vague to determine the true meaning. A vague sentence that really sticks in my mind was when I was at work the other day. I work in a restaurant as a waitress. One of my co-workers had a table walk out on them without paying their bill. She explained to me what they looked like, “They were a group of 4 white teenagers.” Since, a “walkout” means that the waiter or waitress pays the bill, she really wanted to find the group. I then went outside to look for them, but soon realized that her description was too vague to find them. Outside of the restaurant in the parking lot there was a car show going on. There was no possible way to find them.
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That was an interesting, but funny story you got there! That must have been disappointing for you to walk out to look for them, but instead you walk into a crowd of a car show. I hope you didn’t get in to any trouble from that. Hopefully something like that doesn’t happen again! I like how you mention how we simply describe a person just directly from what we assume their ethnicity is. For me, I’m Vietnamese, but for those who can’t seem to categorize me to a specific nationality, they would assume I come from every other ethnicity. We live in such a diverse world that the first thing many of us describe a person is from their appearance such as the color of their skin or their race.
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I agree on how many people use vague sentences all the time. I use them all the time, without ever realizing it. We use common terms all the time without ever thinking twice about it. Especially when describing a group of people, we usually use very vague terms. That was a funny situation you had a work. I often face similar situations while at work. Over the summer I was a lifeguard. I was told a group of "white male guests" were disrupting the others in the pool. I look into the pool and there were so many "white male guests," I couldn't spot them out of the pool of people.