The importance of being long-winded

As you no doubt suspected all along, it was the British who introduced this excessively-respectful faux humility, just as they did in India and other far-flung outposts of their empire. They don’t talk like this in the UK nowadays, so presumably the onus is on Trinidad and Tobago to abandon it too, although it is the people’s choice and if we choose to fly in the face of modernity by continuing to indulge in outdated practices, that is our prerogative.

To call it verbosity would be to misunderstand the reason why public speakers feel obliged to do it. Verbosity is talking too much because the speaker likes the sound of his or her own voice, or perhaps lacks confidence in his or her ability to get his or her point across without covering each and every eventuality.

Also, of course, in this day and age, there is the issue of political correctness to be treated with (to use one of this country’s most widespread formal linguistic tics). At this moment in time I hope you will forgive me for generalising about anything at all.

Far be it from me, for instance, to address you simply as “Ladies and gentlemen”, because as we all know, there are no longer just two genders and there is always a new sub-group — or indeed an individual, vulnerable and eager to take offence — to consider. They must be accorded equal status to those among who us who think of themselves merely as men or women.

But I digress and it is certainly not my intention to waste your valuable time by attempting to be in any way flippant or amusing. This is the 42nd draft of this speech, and it goes without saying (although I had to say it or you wouldn’t know) that I didn’t write it myself. Those of us with proper jobs have better things to do than assemble collages of fancy words with which to articulate our insight and general wonderfulness.

So I engaged the services of a professional writer, albeit with a list as long as the average person’s arm about what someone in my position can and cannot say, regardless of whether it is what we mean. Perhaps I mean should or shouldn’t say, but at this point, at the time of writing, it is 2 am and the writer is well and truly brassed off with the whole thing.

You’re not listening, anyway. You’re thinking about the bloody buffet you can see being tinkered with at the back of the room. Some of you are gasping for a drink, having only been able to talk the servers into letting you have two glasses of the paint-stripper white wine before that clown of an orator got up to do his or her tedious thing.

The dinosaurs among you are dying to go outside for a cigarette. No doubt there are one or two with a little spliff tucked discreetly up your double cuff or inside your brassiere and you can’t wait to wander deep into the car park and allow the weed to take you far away from all this.

Well I’ll tell you what: the writer is waiting outside in a small bus, armed to the teeth with drugs and alcohol, so if anybody is losing the will to live as fast as I was when I wrote this piece of garbage, why don’t you just get up and walk out and we’ll go for a drive and indulge until we feel no more pain.

In conclusion, then, may I wish you all a long and happy life, because I, that is the speaker, am going to hang myself from one of these beautiful chandeliers, which will be far more entertaining for you than listening to my interminable drivel.

But I will not depart this world before writing a cheque and posting it to the writer, which is quite difficult when you’re dangling from the ceiling furniture, so if anybody’s passing a mail box on the way home, perhaps you can do me a favour and help to put food on the writer’s humble table and feed his or her cute and charming children.

And now, without further ado, I will hand you over to the next speaker, because you didn’t think you were getting away with just one, did you?

May I just reiterate what an honour it has been to serve you in my capacity as pointless verbaliser and I look forward to boring you once again in the afterlife.