Sometime soon and other such gems.

It was an offer to host a friendly get together of regular office faces that ended in an oft heard statement. The words traipsed down elegantly to meet the question ‘when?’. This innocuous question got an answer that bamboozled me.

‘Sometime soon’, the answer, is flummoxing, because even though there is a notion of immediacy it is vague enough in time to actually construe nothing.

‘Sometime’ when used as a measure of time is used on a scale between zero and infinity. While ‘soon’ has the promise of being more immediate. Combining both of gives birth to something meant to confuse the linear order that is time.

Communication! ahhh if only it would help break boundaries, if only reading between the lines did not imply staring at empty spaces. What’s worse is that the language does nothing to alleviate the problem.

Another word that fits in this time scale is ‘later’. Though this word does not give a clear indication of when, it is often construed as an implied promise to be fulfilled now than in the opaque of a distant future.

‘Later’, in such a context is usually used when someone is in a hurry and wants to cut the other person off to answer another call. It usually sounds like ‘will call you later’ followed by the autistic beeping of the phone. In this instance too ‘later’ can extend to a time slab that could extend from here to eternity.

In the same league of such ‘what-have-yous’ is the ‘yes but’. These two little words when spoken in the same breath give a certain dubiousness to the entire statement around it. There is an agreement and at the same time a certain level of indecision/disagreement which has not been defined and which can infact negate whatever the ‘yes’ promises.

One wonders about the brain that conceived such terms and the reason thereof. It could have been a lawyer or a diplomat, maybe a politician or just a way-word Joe who coined these weighty terms of no consequence. Whoever created such gems may not have helped further human communication but ensured that their use results in suspended-animation.