What are we talking about again?

September 22, 2007 7:43 AM

Is there a turn of phrase for when someone resumes a conversation after a extended period of time as if no break has occurred?

My wife habitually picks up conversations where she left off sometimes hours later as if no time has passed.* I know this is pretty common and was just wondering if there's a word or phrase for this. English or otherwise, since I know the Germans and French are famous for this sort of stuff: schadenfreude, L'esprit de l'escalier, etc.

* This wouldn't drive me so crazy if she didn't expect me to realize that we were back to the previous subject.

posted by JaredSeth to Writing & Language (20 answers total)

I think the gap itself could be (fancifully) referred to as a caesura. Not sure about the resumption of thought, though.

Perhaps "consummation" works.
posted by jquinby at 7:55 AM on September 22, 2007

You might say the conversation resumed in medias res.
posted by letourneau at 8:04 AM on September 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

My husband and I call it 'looping', as in one of us (we both do it) has looped back in time and the other one has to scurry back with them in order to participate in the conversation.
posted by happyturtle at 8:09 AM on September 22, 2007

Rhetoricidivism.
posted by tss at 8:17 AM on September 22, 2007 [5 favorites]

Narcolexy
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:31 AM on September 22, 2007 [7 favorites]

A male friend of mine refers to this as the "context gene" and says only women have it.
posted by zadcat at 8:38 AM on September 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

Definitely not just women. My husband does it, one of my brothers does it, and my grandfather was the world champion at it.
posted by happyturtle at 8:53 AM on September 22, 2007

Response by poster: letourneau's answer might be as close as I'm going to get. It just seems so widespread that I'd be surprised if there wasn't a specific term or expression for it. Maybe one of the Europeans will come up with something.

I like rhetoricidivism. Too bad I can't manage to say it more than once without stumbling over it.
posted by JaredSeth at 9:41 AM on September 22, 2007

I just had a friend do this to me last night, after an hour-long segue (which is what i call the lapse). I think i called it a segue return, but that could just be a willy-nilly made-up word.
posted by ukdanae at 10:11 AM on September 22, 2007

Hmm, if it was after a derail, could you say the conversation was "re-railed"?
posted by salvia at 10:52 AM on September 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

Neal Cassady was known to resume conversations in mid-sentence after weeks or months had passed. I don't know if there's a word for it, though.
posted by alms at 12:19 PM on September 22, 2007

We talk about this a lot (it seems) within my family, and we have always referred to it as the conversation being un-paused.
posted by jbickers at 1:17 PM on September 22, 2007

i am assuming she recognizes that the time has passed, and therefore this is just a harmless quirk. otherwise, i would make an appointment with a neurologist!

i don't know if there is a name for this.
posted by thinkingwoman at 1:23 PM on September 22, 2007

Well, caesura is definitely the word for the pause itself. Close synonyms: lacuna(e), hiatus, lapse, discontinuity.

(It's definitely not segue, which is a word for conversation that changes from one topic to another, usually deliberately: She mentioned losing her comb at school, so I segued into asking about her homework.)

I can't think of a word for getting back on topic, though. We have derail well established; you'd think there'd be one by now. The closest phrase that comes to mind is as if nothing had happened, which is quite a mouthful but still in common use, suggesting there's no pithy metaphor (at least, that I can think of).
posted by dhartung at 1:56 PM on September 22, 2007

A fine, uncommon word is recrudescence: break[ing] out anew or com[ing] into renewed activity, as after a period of quiescence. (See also rezoomzoomzoom [Mazda ref. only])
posted by rob511 at 5:35 PM on September 22, 2007

Second lacuna. Or maybe if the conversation has utterly jumped away, and then utterly jumps back, without transition, you could say fugue.
posted by eritain at 8:24 PM on September 22, 2007

Well, the breaking of the conversation is known as "going off on a tangent", so perhaps the return to the conversation should be something like "coming back on a cotangent"?
posted by Chunder at 3:38 AM on September 23, 2007

Resumption?
posted by Coaticass at 5:14 AM on September 23, 2007

Me and my ex call it "nesting", where various conversations are going on as nested layers and you just generally have to work your way back up through the layers after you've made your way through all the deviations. It can get layers and layers deep, which is always quite fun, especially if you're, ahem, socially lubricated.
posted by Lleyam at 5:23 AM on September 23, 2007

"Without missing a beat"?
posted by acorncup at 10:54 AM on September 23, 2007