cocktail hour

This evening I had a most fascinatingly sad experience. I escaped from work early, though taking my work with me ... so me and my work ran away together .... (that's an unrepetentent use of the strong pronoun in subject position there) ... and went to the pub. Being that in this part of the world beer and cigarettes can no longer be friends indoors but still remain the best of outdoor buddies, I sat outside the pub. As the weather is cooling considerably, sitting outside the pub is a sure sign you are a smoker. So crazy lady sits down and asks for a cigarette and then asks if she can smoke it with me. She doesn't wait for an answer and just starts sitting talking and smoking simultaneously (as was I). But this woman could not keep on topic. I don't mean she told a story with a million digressions; no. She could not maintain the thread of a topic across a stretch of language longer than the subject and the verb. The rest of the predicate lurched somewhere way beyond the semantic links that connected the subject to the verb. THe funny thing though was all her sentences were grammatically well formed though meaningless. And then I realised ... perhaps she suffered Williams Syndrome. People with this rare genetic disorder have vocabularies as every but their conversation is "socially responsive, fluent, correct in language content and appropriate to context, nevertheless is it curiously devoid of propositional content." (rather like this blog -ed). It was strange to listen to as it seemed that she was more interested in word play and rhythm and rhyme more than anything else... I wish I could remember some of the things she said exactly.