Awkward Moments for JP: Meeting a friend of a friend

I’ve not blogged for a while, and probably shouldn’t be indulging in this pastime now because I have a deadline coming up.  But as we all know, deadlines are great at stimulating procrastination.  I shall therefore proceed to spout an anecdote I’ve been saving for a rainy day.

A while back I was at a social event (a common occurrence, despite the fact that my job involves trains) when a friend explained that a friend of theirs was to join us.  I responded positively to this news, at which point my friend leaned in and said “they’re…” accompanied by some form of gesture.

“Sorry?” I said.

My friend leaned in again, repeated the gesture and said: “they’re…”

At once I understood.  The person who was to join us was deaf.  “Ahh” I said, smiling and nodding knowingly.

But when they joined us, I began to have my doubts.  They didn’t seem to have any difficulty in hearing what I was saying as I introduced myself.  I tried to subtly ascertain if they were lip-reading or wearing a hearing-aid and concluded that they weren’t.  Given that my attempts at subtle aren’t always successful they probably wondered why I was looking at them so strangely, but nothing was said.

The evening continued well, but there remains an unanswered question.  Just what was my friend trying to communicate?  It was a while back now, and even if it was appropriate to bring it up in conversation, what would I say?  And what if I need to be sensitive to something when I meet the person again?

As the saying goes, loose gestures cost lives…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the purpose of religion

One of the things which featured in the recent debate on this post is the idea that “religion should be about improving oneself”. This has got me thinking; ‘religion’ of course takes many forms, but in the vast majority of cases I disagree with this. To paraphrase MarkC, religion is certainly something which as a by-product might help with “improving oneself”, but however you measure self-improvement it is not the sole point, certainly not in the Judeo-Christian case. In fact, if your sole aim is to “improve yourself”, why waste your time playing around with the trappings of religion? Most religions are based around the idea of faith in God, and that, surely, is the point. Considering Christianity specifically, Jesus said “ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself ” and so ‘religion’ should not be in danger of becoming all about wo...
Read more

atheism is a matter of faith, not science: the debate continues

Following the letters page in last Wednesday's Metro and the follow-up comment on this post I’m pleased to see that the beginnings of a debate are brewing, and I intend to use this post to pick up the baton again. Unsurprisingly, I’m going to start by responding to the aforementioned comment. I apologise if my tone was deemed to be a bit sharp, but I have no hesitation in defending the point I was trying to make. According to dictionary.com , faith can be defined as “belief that is not based on proof.” As there is no proof that God does not exist, belief that God does not exist (i.e. atheism) must be faith. Now, I take your point that “as human beings we are always revising and fine tuning what we hold to be true based on the evidence to hand, what we discover and our ability to determine what is probable or improbable.” To digress slightly, that is why switching on the Large Hadron Collider is going to be something of a milestone, as it could eit...
Read more

milk and sugar?

I've been debating with my housemate as to whether tea or coffee is more popular world-wide. We've both done quick web-searches, and we've both got results to match our different claims. I say tea, he says coffee. So, to settle the debate, it's down to you. Do you prefer tea or coffee? Please leave a comment below - one word is all it takes.
Read more