Would you rather have a vagina on your forehead or a row of penises down your back like the plates on a stegosaurus?
What are you doing?
I’m engaging in “medium talk”.
Like “I am getting a message from your late uncle. He says he buried £1 million in your nan’s back garden”?
Not that sort of medium.
Do you have this cardigan in a medium, the small is a bit snug around the armpits?
Not that sort of medium talk either. We are talking about talk that is a level above small talk. So you go to a party and are chatting about the weather or what your job is and you’re a bit bored so you ask: “Do you have any illegal hobbies?” Or “When did you last lie to your partner?”
And what have Stegosaurupenises to do with it?
That was an example of medium talk mentioned in a New York Magazine piece that picked up on social media chat about this concept.
Are concepts medium talk?
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I think they are. Anything that raises conversation above the mundane. On Reddit people came up with thousands of suggestions of medium talk ranging from, “What was Wenger thinking, bringing on Walcott that early?” to “When was your life last in danger?”
Is there a danger that every conversation could end up like a weird NME Q&A?
There is. In fact this whole column feels like medium talk.
That’s a bold claim.
Well, it should be our aspiration, don’t you think?
Indeed. The Socratic method we employ in these dialogues, which far exceeds the tricks of mere Sophists, leads us towards the truth.
Enough of the big talk.