Sensibility*

[redbird]

Something adrian_turtle said this afternoon led to me riffing, for the nth time, on the number of people who tell me I'm sensible.

It doesn't feel, from in here, as though I am noticeably sensible--it's as though people kept telling me I was blond (my Minnesotan friends may now look at the userpic and laugh) or emphasizing that I'm right-handed. I try to be sensible, but I know I frequently miss the mark, and it doesn't feel as though I'm better at it than other people I know.

What I said to Adrian is that, if this many people are telling me I'm sensible, either they have a very different definition of sensible than I do, or there's far less good sense in the population as a whole than I tend to think.

She said it's probably the latter, which is worrisome, though it would Explain A Lot, or at least explain this.

A third possibility, which didn't occur to me until I was proofreading this post, is that I may make unusually sensible observations and suggestions, even if I'm no more likely than other people to behave sensibly.

*Yes, as in Sense and, and the former is the quality I'm being praised for. But "sensibleness" doesn't feel like a word, and "sensible" is the adjective I seem to keep attracting.

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Even before I saw your 3rd possibility, I was thinking something along those lines. I remember, when we met, I said something about adding you to my flist because I was seeing your comments in other people's journals and you sounded sensible, and you and Adrian_Turtle looked at each other and you laughed.

I don't really know whether you're any more or less sensible a person than many other people I know. But there's a pragmatic, human, solid, earth-element quality to your responses to things that seems best summed up by the word 'sensible.' You rarely engage in rants or flights of wild emotion where they're easily visible on LJ, at any rate. You seem to have a good handle on what reasonable expectations are for yourself and for other people. You don't seem to be easily swept up in someone else's passions.

But all of that's your presence on LJ. It's not about what you'd seem like to me if I lived or worked with you.

Although your discussion of it does make me wonder what associations you have with the word. It seems like, if there are people you would imagine describing as 'sensible,' they wouldn't be much like you. So I wonder who they would be, or what they would be like.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, door #3 is my choice; at least that's why my gestalt of you contains "sensible". you rarely rant, or indulge in complete flights of fantasy when talking about an issue; you seem mostly down-to-earth and straight-forward in what you write and how you write about it.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's partly that there's far less good sense in the population as a whole than I tend to think and partly that you've got "sensible" as a quality tied up with a lot of more boring qualities that fen tend to lump together as 'mundane' ones.

"Sensible" is not the opposite of "imaginative"!

... even if the mundanes keep trying to tell us that it is.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Posting this comment before I close my web browser; it's not properly "finished", but I need to get rid of the distraction of the internet so I can get on with work...

I can't comment on how you behave "in real life", but certainly I regard you as sensible on livejournal. You are one of the people I can rely on to come up with useful comments on difficult situations. You're good at seeing nuances in arguments and sides of a problem that other people haven't seen, or are too emotional to consider rationally.

[quility.livejournal.com]

I'd say it is mostly #3.

When we meet ppl, we are looking for a striking feature about them. If your hair was magenta, or if blond was an unusual color - you might better understand why people comment on that feature.

In your case - the feature that often stands out about you is how sensible you are. It seems to me that other ppl let other factors influence them more than you do. So yes - you might not be as sensible as you like - but comparatively - it's noticable.