It happens, now and then, that there’s a wee communication gap between spouses. This is especially prevalent in marriages between one (1) man and one (1) woman. One of the few humorous passages in C. S. Lewis’s masterpiece That Hideous Strength speaks to that phenomenon most eloquently:
“The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.” He pronounced this so as to rhyme with “get at us.”
“There’s your tea now,” said Ivy Maggs, “and I’ll go and get you a piece of cake, which is more than you deserve. And when you’ve had it you can go upstairs and talk about nouns for the rest of the evening.”
“Not about nouns: by means of nouns,” said MacPhee, but Mrs. Maggs had already left the room.
As it happens, something of the sort afflicted my morning interactions with the C.S.O.:
CSO: Sweetie, did you put stuff on the thing?
FWP: Huh?CSO: (gestures vaguely) You know, on the… the…
FWP: The what?(approximately twenty seconds elapse in silence)
CSO: The…. The Lane chest!
FWP: (shakes head in disbelief) I’m enrolling you in an English course.
CSO: Why?
FWP: Nouns. You’ve run out of nouns and need a resupply.
CSO: (walks off in a huff)
A sad but typical case.
