During the good ol' childhood days, my parents used to bring a lot of typical English and Hindi youth magazines for us (me and my sister), like Champak, Nandan, Balhans etc etc. I remember Target as one of the most likeable ones in the English ones (don't know if it's in circulation anymore). An avid reader/follower of it, I still remember the laugh-riot cartoon series of Gardhab Das, apart from some fantastic stories. The double page in the center of the magazine used to be dedicated to humorous illustrations - I vividly recall one of them even now - and also, that serves what's-coming-ahead-in-this-article.
The description below mightn't bring the spontaneous grin that would've appeared on your face had you looked at it directly, but I'll go ahead nonetheless...
Imagine two women, standing across a fence that separates their respective gardens. One of them holds a running water hose in her hand and is so engrossed in talking with the other, that her whole garden has already flooded with almost a feet of water!! Her pet dog is shown nearby, swimming and woof-ing with an astonished expression, but as would be obvious, the women are just too absorbed to pay any heed.
And, that brings me to the topic of this article - does the trait of chattering/talking incessantly hinge on the chromosome-content (XX vs. XY, I mean!)? Further, how far does the environment dictate its developmet? As school kids, I think girls certainly had a higher propensity of talking than boys (even though we were meted out punishments more frequently.... maybe, the teachers didn't want such unnatural traits to be nurtured in boys!? :D)
Nevertheless, the following extract, that's been copy-pasted from Anne Frank - Diary of A Young Girl, contains something relevant and also, makes a good read as it's both cute & funny! :)
Mr. Keesing, the old fogey who teaches math, was mad at me for the longest time because I talked so much. After several warnings, he assigned me extra homework. An essay on the subject "A Chatterbox." A chatterbox, what can you write about that? I'd worry about that later, I decided. I jotted down the assignment in my notebook, tucked it in my bag and tried to keep quiet. That evening, after I'd finished the rest of my homework, the note about the essay caught my eye. I began thinking about the subject while chewing the tip of my fountain pen. Anyone could ramble on and leave big spaces between the words, but the trick was to come up with convincing arguments to prove the necessity of talking. I thought and thought, and suddenly I had an idea. I wrote the three pages Mr. Keesing had assigned me and was satisfied. I argued that talking is a female trait and that I would do my best to keep it under control, but that I would never be able to break myself of the habit, since my mother talked as much as I did, if not more, and that there's not much you can do about inherited traits. Mr. Keesing had a good laugh at my arguments, but when I proceeded to talk my way through the next class, he assigned me a second essay. This time it was supposed to be on "An Incorrigible Chatterbox." I handed it in, and Mr. Keesing had nothing to complain about for two whole classes. However, during the third class he'd finally had enough. "Anne Frank, as a punishment for talking in class, write an essay titled 'Quack, Quack, Quack, said Mistress Chatterback.' "
So, as we see, Anne's frank :D in confessing that loquaciousness is something that comes very naturally to her! Another such testimony-to-talkativeness could be obtained, if one attempts to categorize the phone bills of a typical family... say, parents with two children, a boy and girl - I am very sure the female section of the family shall have the scales tilted heavily in their favour, in at least 3/4th of the cases! ;)
I could even collect statistics from you bloggers/blog-readers and publish them here, time to time! So contribute, if you feel like :) But for now, I suddenly feel I've been pretty talkative myself :P sooo...... time to say, Goodbye garrulity!
