Mister Bombastic

During our Toastmasters meeting this week, Tatee texted me after I had just delivered a speech "2 Steps Forward and 1 Step Back."

Tatee: "I need to bunga-bungakan my sentences! I tend to use very straight forward simple English. Was told to use a few bombastic, descriptive words".

Me: "Oh! Kena baca lots of fiction".

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The day after, I started reading a book "Mister God, This is Anna". It is an account of a 4 year old who seemed to understand with uncanny certainty the purpose of being, the essence of feeling and the beauty of love. The following is the extract from the book. 

"The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, the churchgoing and Mister God talks had no necessary connection. 

For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Religion was for doing things, not for reading about things. Once you got the message there wasn't much point in going over the same old ground. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was just for swank!"

And the message:

"I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees - and the catalog went on - with all of me." 

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Anna's thoughts were expressed in straight forward simple English but the message has since, entrenched in my medial temporal lobes forming part of my semantic memory. I just couldn't stop thinking about it. 

Which brought me back to my advice for Tatee. 

Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have told her that it is not the bombastic words that she should be concerned about. It is far more important to focus on the usage of vocabulary that can help express ourselves and connect with others. Just what Anna had done. She and I are now connected at so many different levels with just the above passage. She had managed to get into my head and when it comes to storytelling, that is the ultimate goal!