The lights went out. Did this person say "conversate?" I must be a word snob because I immediately lost all desire to finish the interview, work at this place of business, and be around any of their luxury watches. I'll go somewhere else. Conversate.
I want to be clear: I did not turn the lights out. The lights went out. My brain and body reacted the same way my body reacted when I got knocked out.
I got knocked out once. Back in the day, on Stanton Street back in B-Town, one of the guys had bought some boxing gloves, and we were all taking turns boxing each other. During the Me vs. The Outside Linebacker fight, Outside Linebacker connected a left hook with the right side of my face, and I fell.
Falling was not my decision. My soul wanted to remain standing. However, my spirit was not in control. Upon impact, my body went into autopilot. The chin sent a message to the brain that we had been hit... hard... and the brain decided to nap. Being the quick responders that they are, my knees immediately buckled. I was on my way to Sleepytown.
My spine went into jelly mode to decrease damage upon impact with the ground, and right before I hit the ground, my left arm shot up - again, not my decision - and placed my left gloved hand between the earth and my head. I hit the ground. The lights went out. I napped.
That's how it felt inside when I heard conversate. Except I didn't nap. I conversed. Then, I left, knowing I would never return. Conversate.
I, too, once used this word. It was the logical root of the word conversation at the time. I hadn't tapped into my passion for words yet, so I used the word freely.
Until my run-in with SACU.
There is a covert syndicate of people I like to call The Society Against Conversate Use. The entire mission of the SACU is to inform as many people as possible that conversate is not a word and that the proper term is converse.
I encountered a SACU member in my fourth year of University. After being hit with the SACU mission statement and running to the dictionary for verification, my first thought was, "Why hasn't someone told The Notorious B.I.G.?"
I didn't join the SACU that day, but I did stop using the word. And I formed some type of something about its use and its users. As ridiculous as it sounds, I still can't wrap my head around a man who deals with luxury watches on an international level using this make-believe word.
I also found it hard to believe that this person had made so many rotations around the sun (in the dark, I managed to recall that he made a point to state his age and how long he had been doing this work) and had not once come in contact with a member of the SACU.
Or had he, and he chose not to change?
We shall never know.