THINK INSIDE THE BOX

MY SISTER LAURA AND I DISCOVERED AS KIDS how fun it is to laugh at other people’s spoonerisms, non sequitors, mispronunciations, unintended double meanings and other mockable delights of the twisted and fallible human tongue.

Laura once thought that place in her college cafeteria holding the ketchup packets, salt shakers and butter pats was called the “compliment cart.” I thought the rest of us around the dinner table were going to spray milk through our noses laughing at that. She now knows it’s the “condiment cart.” To be fair, she still goes weak with laughter when she reminds me of the time I was so enraged at her over some teenage sibling trauma that what came out my mouth was the utterly nonsensical, yet clearly angry: “You ain’t got NOTHING wrong with me!”

Ever since those days I’ve had an ear for aural oddities and amusements. This week delivered three:

My new dentist told me with the swift and sure word choice of a poet that I have a “strong, meaty and all encompassing tongue.” I’ve never been so unsure if I’ve been flattered or criticized, but I spent the rest of the day self-conscious, tight-lipped and worried that my tongue might be overtaking the rest of my mouth in some sort of oral coup de tat. Talk about an inside job.

Then, in the midst of an otherwise normal business meeting, an incredibly high-powered executive spontaneously and earnestly told me and my colleagues about his plan to be buried in an Egyptian-style tomb. He showed us the sketch. “These hieroglyphics represent my guns, my chainsaws and my huntin’ dogs.”

I honestly never anticipated hearing “hieroglyphics” juxtaposed with “guns,” “chainsaws,” and “huntin’ dogs.” It made my day.

The most informative moment of the week, however, might have come with a snippet I overheard between what appeared to be a father and son as they walked into the Tower Records store a few paces in front of me.

(Father) “What are we looking for?”

(Son) “I dunno.”

(Father) “How will we know when we’ve found it?”

Good question. It occurred to me that there might be more than a chuckle in it though. By coincidence, this week I’ve been reading an article in “Scientific American Mind” magazine about fostering group creativity. Most of the techniques discussed were the usual suspects. But one, called didactic brainstorming, caught my attention. Didactic brainstorming calls for the facilitator to “hide the problem.” Rather than telling participants what the goal of the brainstorm is, you probe on a much higher-level issue and gradually drill down to what you’re really interested in. So, if your goal is to come up with, say, a new soft drink bottle design, you wouldn’t spell that out to your brainstormers. Instead, you might simply ask them “What do you do when you’re thirsty?”

The proposed advantage of this technique is that by not telling people what problem you’re trying to solve, you avoid getting a rehash of the obvious solutions. Instead you circle around associations, emotions, experiences and behaviors that might lead you to make new connections between old elements.

I may or may not try it in my next creativity session, but reading that article, and listening to that record-store exchange was a good reminder to me that being open to happenstance, serendipity and unknown ends is a pretty useful way to keep things fresh in your “box” of experiences.

I’m not sure if there are any epiphanies to be had in the vastness of my tongue or the vision of a good-old-boy version of Tut’s tomb, but I was happy to unwrap an amusing bit of language and find at least one insight inside it this week. I suppose there may be some moral ambiguity involved in “inspiration through eavesdropping,” but it’s not very reliable anyway. The next time I tried it I wished I hadn’t. You really don’t want to tune into someone just as they’re telling their friend “The swelling went down, but it still hurts really bad.”

© 2006 John Armato
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