For a writer, I am remarkably bad at communicating with my fellow humans. I'd like to blame anxiety and social awkwardness but it's probably just that I'm stupid. Anyway, here follows a brief exchange I just had with a colleague during a casual conversation about public transportation.
What I meant: "Have you ever ridden on a Greyhound bus?"
What I actually said: "Have you ever done a greyhound?"
And while on the subject, here's another exchange I recently had with a student. She had written about raising and riding horses and I wanted to make the point that it's lyrically possible to convey both elevated, intellectual concepts and simple, physical emotion at the same time, depending on word choice, connotation, duality of action and imagery, etc. While I was thinking this, I flashed back to a prose-poem I'd read by the great Ben Percy back when we were in the same workshop. His piece was about horse-breeding.
What I actually said: "I remember a friend of mine wrote this story about jacking off horses..."
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