The F-L Shimmy

Have you ever defecated in your pants? Right, me neither, but there are surely countless other, less messy, situations we've all been in that are completely embarrassing. I mean, I guess pooping yourself alone is slightly less embarrassing than pooping yourself in public, but it's still embarrassing. A tree that falls in a forest with no one around to hear it still makes a bit of noise, right? Anyway, most embarrassing situations are embarrassing because they happen in front of other people.

Some of you won't think this is embarrassing, but if you know anything about my insistence on correctness, then you'll bear with me a bit. When communicating with someone you are trying to impress, someone you do not want thinking you are a dumbass, it's typical to pay attention to every word they say. I tend to attempt soul crushing eye contact. I've developed an amazing ability to nod in a agreement, shake in disgust, and hmmmm in contemplation in just the right moments to make the speaker believe I am 157% aware and knowledgeable of everything going on. These subtle tools to success, however, shatter once confronted with what I will call the F-L Shimmy.

Most people don't encounter this feat of eloquent totalitarianism very often. I went decades without paying any attention to it. In fact, it wasn't til a couple of years ago that I finally developed a mnemonic device with which to remember it. Well, maybe it's not really a mnemonic device. Now that I think of it, I don't really need to do this trick to understand the F-L Shimmy. Regardless, now that I have you on the edge of your seat: the F-L Shimmy is what I call the act of a speaker describing two extremely complex things in tremendous detail, moving on to a slightly related topic, then backtracking to refer to those previously mentioned complex things as former and latter.

This most certainly happened to me this week. I was having a conversation with a person I certainly wanted to, needed to impress with my intellectual prowess. First off, I struggled through the swampy marsh created in the complex discussion of the two things my conversational partner was talking about. These two things appeared to share relatively little in common other than the fact that one was verbally expressed before the other. Clueless as to what these two things were, I was then forced to try to remember which one was said first and which was said second. Not only that, but I was supposed to respond to a question about why the first thing said (the former, that's my trick, former is the first and latter is the last) makes so much more sense than the second thing said, and why, despite this seemingly obvious fact, I chose to approach a problem with the second thing as my tool rather than the first.

I nodded, shook, hmmmmmmed. . . Several quiet seconds went by. I gave up trying to figure out what was actually going on. I reenacted that play in the 1989 playoffs when Jordan hit the shot over Craig Ehlo in my mind about three times before I finally gave in to the stone cold stare of previously mentioned conversational partner. I opened my mouth and responded in a way that required neither the former nor the latter (at least I don't think it did). I introduced a new thing! A third thing! There can be no F-L Shimmy with a list of three! Well, I guess there can, but the middle one will certainly be neglected due to not having a properly pretentious form of representation.

Whatever. This is what my week has come to. It's Friday night. 11:30 p.m. on the dawn of Labor Day weekend 2K9 and I'm freaking blogging about a verbal misunderstanding. Someone, come share an expensive dessert with me.