YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Dear
Mary. . . Q. A friend has returned from America with a maddening new vocal tic. He ends every sentence with an upward inflexion as though it were a question. What can I do to stop him, and worse, myself, as I find the habit so infectious that I begin almost thinking in with him? questions when I have been M.W., London WI `Questobabble' is an appalling new The — but seductive, as you have noted. lite discreet powers it bestows on the questobabbler are irresistible. First, the shorthand opportunities: a question-mark is applicable to the end of every sentence a person speaks, since it does away with the need for asking if the listener has under- stood or is in agreement. Second, the domi- nation opportunities: rather than halting Your flow with comments or awkward ques- tions, the would-be interlocutor is reduced to silent nodding and eyebrow-raising, and the questobabbler can hold the floor unchallenged. The vice must be swiftly tamped out since, like ground-elder, once it has taken hold it can be impossible to eradicate. Redress the balance next time you are in conversation with your friend by ending every sentence of your own with a downward inflexion, your last word dropping off into a slow, depressing moan. When your friend questions this vocal tic, announce, `Yes, I'm trying to cure myself of this terrible new habit I've picked up of ending all my sentences with question-marks. Do you find you do that sometimes?'
Q. The other night, I went to a dinner party given by a powerful hostess with whom I have many friends in common, but whom I have not seen much myself since we were both guests on the same beach holiday ten years ago. After dinner, a small group of us was browsing through one of her photo- graph albums when I saw, to my horror, a photograph of myself in a bathing costume taken on the holiday I mentioned. It was a deeply unflattering photograph and I feel shocked and betrayed that this outrage could have been perpetrated without my knowledge, and that for all these years scores of mutual friends have been seeing this negative propaganda. What are the rules about pasting in appalling pho- tographs of people who might never know they are being thus represented? Surely it is an unacceptable practice?
Name and address withheld A. The unwritten rule is that the funnier the photograph, the more likely it is to be pasted in. There is usually no malice intended and, even if there were, it would make little difference to your social success. Your experience serves to demonstrate an eternal truism, since none of the friends you have in common appears to have thought any the less of you during this ten- year period the negative propaganda has been in force — people are only interested in themselves. Indeed, the photograph may have rendered you a more sympathetic and likable figure, since beautiful women are almost always seen as an irritant, particu- larly by powerful hostesses.
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