levity
We are at last reduced to talking about the weather. I suppose it must happen eventually, when you are learning a language – talking about the weather. It is more than collection of vocabulary and predictions, though; we haven’t anything else to talk about. Daily routines, general likes and dislikes, grammatical particularities, and the answers to any language-related question I can come up in the week’s interval, all have been considered and filed away in the realm of acquired material. 1 And so we are talking about the weather in every sense, filling the time with bland inoffensive murmurings. We are both a little bored, and we both wish that we had something else to talk about. It looks, for a moment, as though we might veer onto the equally implacable, unutterable topic of health, but as we are both a bit under the weather, we each take our turn to cough, and discuss the effect of humidity on one’s perception of the cold.
- Though not, I am ashamed to admit, of acquired knowledge or ability.[↩]