(2005-12-16) Rbw How Real Life Is Different From Fiction Part2

RBW: How Real Life is Different from Fiction, Part 2

People talk to themselves all the time, especially in books written from first-person perspective. It's the art of the novel.

Most normal children grow up chattering and jabbering to each other.

But some children -- geek children Raised by Wolves -- grow up reading books instead of talking to other children.

As a result, when geek kids do talk, they talk like a book

But the worst of it is this: unwonted interiority.

In real life, most people are as terse as a Unix command. Listen to a blue-collar workman sometime, or an athlete talking about his sport: they say exactly what needs to be said in as few words as possible,

Many geeks, though, speak with "-v" turned on: they mutter a constant stream of observations, expose everything they're thinking, as if life were a math assignment and they had been asked to show their work.

many geeks are so offended by the very idea of telling others what to do that they spend all their lives in the declarative voice, and never use the imperative voice at all. These are the geeks who recoil from moving into management.