Vocal Insight

It's fairly common to see posts on LinkedIn that concern themselves with character. Some of them offer heuristics for determining character, like this one:

"A person's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation."

Mark Twain

So, here's a question: Can a person's character be learned from the accuracy with which they attribute quotes?

Because (as I'm sure you've guessed), this is not a Mark Twain quote. Let's unpack this a bit.

It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman: The Optimist, “Conversation” 1850

Samuel Clemens' wife, Olivia, is thought to have written the paraphrasing (using the language of the time) in her "commonplace book" as a teenager. And that's likely why this particular item became associated with him. As near as I can tell, it doesn't appear in any of Mr. Clemens' works - I was unable to find an attribution that came with a citation. The closest was one attribution with a date of 1907.

"Conversation" is an essay about the art of, well, conversation, and after the quote above, Mr. Tuckerman notes that whether someone is enthusiastic, dogmatic, subdued, acute, soulful or so on, can be determined by the words they use to describe the world around them. It's a fairly obvious point, when one thinks about it; it's common for people to understand the way a person speaks as indicative of not only their current mood, but their broader personality. People alter their speech patterns to convey a certain impression of themselves, even when the impression they're aiming for is authenticity; and they scrutinize the way others speak to look for clues for everything from past actions to future plans. Given that it's currently campaign season, examples of this abound.

Likewise, impressions are part of the goal of LinkedIn posts, or for that matter, a blog; for the writer to convey something about themselves through what they write, and what they write about. I don't know that I, personally, do a great job of that, being a rather... haphazard author. Although I'm sure that people have picked up on the fact that I can be a bit wordy at times.