For months and months the Hemmingways
Have lallified of Baby,
How Baby walks and talks and plays—
And have I listened? Maybe.
But now the time has come, today,
To lallify that pair;
For I am working on a play,
And talk about it there!
Le´o-lump, n. 1. An interrupter of conversations; one who always brings the talk back to himself. 2. An egoist; one who thinks you are necessarily interested in what interests him.
“When I was in Italy,” I began, carelessly—
“Oh, dear, I’ve never been out of New York!” she whined. “I do wish I could go to Italy sometime!”
She was a leolump. I could not mention anything without her applying it to herself. The word “objective” was not in her dictionary.
The leolump always caps your story with one stranger and bigger than yours. He has acquired the art of the superlative. (See Persotude.)
Talk to a leolump actor of logarithms, and in an instant he will prove relationship; he can show himself to be first cousin to the carbo-hydrates in a congress of foreign chemists.
Conversation? Impossible when a leolump is present. Even if he has the civility not to interrupt, which he hasn’t, the minute you stop speaking he is astride his hobby and riding himself to social suicide. (See Blurb.)
He has a million subjects ready in the pigeon-hole marked “I.”