Wanna kickit?

Nina recently posted on flibbertigibbet! ...

"Why, pray tell, would these words fall from a man's mouth at all, let alone only prefaced by the word hello and given to a grown woman?

"Whatcha up for?

"Want to hookup?

"And my personal favorite, wanna kickit?"

I'm not sure why I thought about this all this time, but I did. The reason these words would fall from a man's mouth is because, in one or more previous instances, they have worked.

We all occasionally make the mistake of assuming that other people share our same cultural reference points. Nina and I both would like to think that no one would be impressed or even amused by the line 'wanna kickit?'

But I guarantee you that even though it didn't work on Nina, it probably did work on someone else... possibly the tube-top girl at the Marriott blogblah! described in his comment.

I once had a woman - not someone I was trying to pick up, but just someone I knew - get upset when I used the word 'profligate' in a sentence. She was upset because:

1. she didn't know what it meant.


2. she suspected it was a profanity.


3. she suspected I used it knowing full well she wouldn't know what it meant, and chose it specifically to belittle her intelligence and education.

Of course, none of this was going through my mind at the time. But that event, along with a few others, made it very real to me that some people are intimidated by even average intelligence, resent even average intelligence, and are much more comfortable with the 'hey, babe' level of interpersonal communication.

(Y'know, there's a part of me that wishes women would get all dreamy-eyed and breathy when they heard a guy talk about neither being nor not being. And maybe they do in Tibet or Nepal or Esalen Institute or some other place.

But not here. In these parts, yer better off stickin' with 'wanna kickit'?)