Sunday, March 1, 2009

oN iNAPPROPRIATE gROUPINGS

There is an enormous amount of information and experience that is impossible for any one person to contain. For those of us still open to learning new things, we have adapted to this idea by learning through extension. In the universal effort to connect with others (this, of course, does not apply to the non-sociable among us), we have made a habit of grouping things in our lives with things outside of our lives to make bridges of understanding and comprehension between ourselves and everyone else. This habit does not always work smoothly and can sometimes lead to the use of a false tool: the inappropriate grouping.

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The inappropriate grouping is the juxtaposition of two things that are normally not placed side by side. One can usually see the comparison on a logical level, but the grouping doesn’t work in a social context.

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Before going into why an inappropriate grouping doesn’t work conversationally, I want to mention the normalcy of a correct grouping for contrast. If a person mentions that he went snowboarding this weekend, I might mention that I like to ski because the two sports are commonly associated winter sports. Even if I don’t snowboard, I can imagine by extension some of the same excitement that that person experienced on the mountain. Furthermore, the snowboarder can imagine that a skier would understand, which in turn helps make the interaction mutually enjoyable.

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An inappropriate grouping on the other hand can make the intended audience feel a little uncomfortable. Imagine someone tells me that she has cancer and will have to go through the subsequent chemo/radiation/surgery routine to make it better. Imagine further that I say, “I understand. My dog got cancer, and it was really hard on him.” Aside from the lack of compassion, which because of the extremity of the example might do the most harm, I would be guilty of using an inappropriate grouping, the comparison of a dog to a person. Logically, there’s no reason to believe that one would be different from the other. Socially, however, one can expect his audience not to enjoy being compared to a dog.

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Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, complained of being the victim of inappropriate groupings. People, in an attempt to make conversation and try to understand what it is that he did, would tell him that their children liked to write poetry. This angered Billy Collins. His retort to these people was something like this: “It would be like me finding out that you were a banker, and then saying that my kid liked playing with change.” The inappropriate grouping in both cases is made between a professional and a kid dabbling in the same. A professional does not want to be compared to a rookie and further does not want to be compared to a child who couldn’t even rightly qualify as a rookie.

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Inappropriate groupings immediately terminate any sense that two people are sharing a moment of mutual comprehension. “I’ve got a wife, kids, friends, people who count on me to be around, and you just compared me to your dog?” If an issue is sensitive enough, there’s no recovery from an inappropriate grouping about that particular thing. Emotions and pride get wrapped around certain aspects of a person’s life. An inappropriate grouping can be construed as an attack on or insult to those things held dear. “I didn’t write poetry for twenty years just to be compared to a kid.”

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If you are the perpetrator of an inappropriate grouping, you might practice thinking a bit more and talking a bit less. Once you’ve said something, it’s hard to unsay it. Groupings you make mentally and to yourself are never inappropriate and can help you understand a very large and complicated world. If you are the victim of an inappropriate grouping, you have two options at your disposal: confrontation or get-over-it-ation. I suggest the former for close friends and family and the latter for everyone else.

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It’s a hard enough world understanding one person’s life, let alone a few billion.