Sometimes the pause, or the intonation of a potential closing sentence, is just right to get me thinking “that must be the end”. One think I’ve noticed is that cobined with my own previous media experience, it has oversensitzed me to people IRL who somehow never seem to be able to nail how to wind down and end their speaking turn.
So, why do you do that?
dammit!
The correct option among the three stories in a “Bluff the Listener” challenge on Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me is often told with slight embellishments, making it harder to use process of elimination to narrow down the choices. Only the broad outline of the story and most of the details need to be accurate. By availing herself of poetic license in this manner, the teller of the true story:
- is lacking faith in the maxim “Truth is stranger than fiction,” or
- believes that the other storytellers will be so obviously over-the-top that the embellishments are needed to level the playing field.
Cite: MP3 of the February 27 game (unless I’m being whooshed and Leah Holland actually does have a tattoo on her back saying “The privatized free market grid in Texas is a workable solution that will never fail.”)
The NPR quirk that sticks out to me is Ira Glass introducing “Ack One” of his program.
Well, there is the issue that WWDTM is intended as jokey entertainment. Who among us has not embelished some otherwise true story of our own to make it (we think) more entertaining to our listeners?
The celebrities telling the false stories aren’t quite helping out by coming up with stories that 1) aren’t remotely plausible and 2) aren’t really all that funny joke-wise. But could I do better? No effing way.
Whom. This is NPR!
Yes Glass seems to be entirely untrained, what, oration? Enunciation? He makes many of the mistakes a novice would but I guess no one sees any reason to point them out to him.