The Bore

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21467, 15 April 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

The Bore

First of all, what is a bore? Theophrastus, who had all human types clear as Tenniel drawings in front of him, says, " The boro is the kind of person who will sit down next someone ho doesn't know and start praising his own wife; then he tells a dream ho had last night and goes on to describe everything he ate for dinner." Tho Oxford Dictionary says that a boro is a nusiance, tiresome person, twaddler, and that early quotations imply a French derivation, " bourrer " stuff, satiate. This is excellent as far as tho stuffing and satiating go, but bores aro by no means always twaddlers. For highly intellectual people aro often bores, and it is not because they " twaddle." Sometimes it is because of an innate dryness —they seem to wither whatever they touch. Sometimes it is because of a queer inadaptability. There are people who can neither tako their hearers along with them nor change their, stride and march to another rhythm. They are neither good talkers nor good listeners, and are often enough conscious of their solitude. This is the most elevated type of bore. Ho is like tho poet born and nothing can be done about him, and in any case it is worse for him than for other people. Not so with tho common type.

A TAX ON SOCIETY

He is happy; he does not know that he is boring, A hint is nothing to him; lie is too happy, he cannot take it. Ho lives in a delicious world of which lie himself is the centre, and he is unaware of the atmosphere round him. This could have been knocked out of him as a child. We all start this way; wo are all egocentric and thick-skinned as babies, and it is only rather painfully that we learn tho importance of other people. Many dear, good, unselfish, and modest people are boring. They are so slow in getting to the point, their talk is so fidl of repetition, of irrelevancies, of unilluminating detail. Education ought to rescue them from theso errors, for concentration, clarity, precision, and tho power to select what is significant are a matter of training. Tho French are much better talkers than we aro, largely because their education has laid stress on theso things and because they have been taught to be much more observant. No one who is keenly observant is boring, and it is, alas, our bookish education that has destroyed this gift in so many of us. People would bo less dull, top, if they were more themselves if they talked about things they really cared about and said what they really thought. Honesty, if tempered by good humour, is less offensive than we imagine and gives vigour and savour to speech.