Overheard conversation

After my work, I went to Fred Meyer to deposit my paycheck to the Alaska USA Credit Union. It was 5:30 pm, a rush time, so I waited in the line. There were many people, everybody talked about different things. One man talked to his wife about the vacation in May; two ladies were complaining about the noise in their office. I didn’t try to listen to anybody; therefore, I heard one conversation of two young women about a birthday party for their friend Linda. One of them said, “I was talking on the phone with Emily about Linda’s secret birthday party while I was cooking dinner and I accidentally spilled the beans; Emily was mad on me”.

In my mind immediately popped up the picture from that conversation. The first woman’s name was Kelly. She just came from work and started cook dinner. She decided to cook some healthy food. So, her choice was to boil the beans with other vegetables. She started preparing the ingredients; she washed the celery, carrots, pepper, tomatoes, parsley. Then she tried to remember where she put a can with beans. Kelly found out that it was on the top shelf in the kitchen cabinet. She placed the ladder in front of the cabinet and reached the can with beans. When she came down, the phone started ringing. She took a phone. Her friend Emily was calling to ask a couple questions about Linda’s birthday party on Saturday. Meanwhile, Kelly tried to open the can with beans, because she already put all ingredients in the pot with boiling water; it was time to add the beans. Therefore, she was talking with Emily; she was destructed by doing to things in one time. As a result, she accidentally spilled the beans on the floor. She started laughing at herself. Because of this situation, she even forgot that she was talking to Emily all that time. Kelly hung up. It wasn’t really nice, but her floor was covered by beans.

This overheard conversation made sense but in two ways. I could think literally about talking on the phone and spilling the beans, like it usually happened! Although, the part of this conversation, when Kelly told Emily was mad on her, didn’t make sense without the continuation of their conversation. I could guess that she was mad because Kelly hung up or because she didn’t pay attention to what Emily was saying. Another case was if I could understand this conversation and “spilled the beans” as an idiom. It would be a different story and the result of it. Kelly could tell somebody about the secret party, thus she would ruin the surprise. That’s why Emily could be mad on her.

As we can see, the phrase without context can have so many explanations and variations. People can be mad because of not having enough information or not paying attention to the context of conversations. The context can change people’s lives. There are lots of situations when people heard just a phrase that had a different context, if they would hear the whole conversation.