{"id":1141,"date":"2013-01-02T23:57:45","date_gmt":"2013-01-02T23:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=1141"},"modified":"2013-01-02T23:57:45","modified_gmt":"2013-01-02T23:57:45","slug":"the-right-form-of-words-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=1141","title":{"rendered":"The Right form of Words (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Something that happens from time to time is that I meet someone who I haven&#8217;t seen for a while, and who doesn&#8217;t know any details about my life over the last couple of years, in which time my mother has died and my father has a number of issues that require me to travel back to Nottingham almost every week.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve struggled for a while to find what my colleague Keith Mander calls &#8220;the right form of words&#8221; to introduce this. It seems odd to have a casual conversation and wait for the &#8220;right moment&#8221; to introduce it; indeed, this can just add stress to a conversation as you wait for a moment, and you risk letting the other person feel a fool for not knowing, e.g. if they make some casual jokey comment that seems offensive given the change of circumstances. On the other hand, blurting it all out straight away &#8220;Hi! bythewaymymotherdiedand&#8230;&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;form of words&#8221; that I&#8217;ve gradually become comfortable with begins with a brief flag; after an initial exchange of pleasantries, I say something like &#8220;Have I told you about what has been happening over the last couple of years?&#8221; or &#8220;I ought to tell you about what&#8217;s been happening over the last couple of years.&#8221; This then changes the tone of the conversation and allows me to talk about it without feeling that I have blundered into it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something that happens from time to time is that I meet someone who I haven&#8217;t seen for a while, and who doesn&#8217;t know any details about my life over the last couple of years, in which time my mother has died and my father has a number of issues that require me to travel back [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}