Segue much?

I know I have previously mentioned CCL’s innate ability to turn any conversation back to her cats. Today’s interaction with her gave me yet another solid example of this.

She was standing in my cube, griping about how she’s walking on the cuffs of her pants that are all-of-a-sudden too long & she can’t figure out why. (I checked to make sure there weren’t any missing safety pins around the bottom edge of the pant legs, but then realized these aren’t her brown polyester pants that she has yet to have hemmed—after almost five years. Those pants have safety pins all the way around the bottom edge of the legs; but these were, in fact, her gray pants.) In practically the same breath, she said that she’s still on her exercise plan (which left her so sore she couldn’t lift a baking dish into the above-range microwave the other night when she wanted to heat dinner) but that she’s gaining weight.

I told her it was most likely muscle weight she’s gaining, particularly if her clothes are fitting her differently. She didn’t like my explanation and instead wondered if she’d simply shrunk. And I quote (literally—I was trying to look distracted & busy while she was talking to me in hopes she’d go away faster, so I was writing everything down that she said as it came out of her mouth & letting her think I was making work-related notes), “It could be possible that I shrunk, because my cats were pure evil yesterday when I was on a conference call while working from home.” She then went straight into what each cat did, who hissed at whom, which cat jumped on the counter, which one she had to continually talk to, etc. But going back to her oh-so-smooth segue…

When studying for the LSAT several years back now, I learned all about the typical types of logical argument, with my favorite being called Red Herring.  (Don’t ask me what it means now; I just remember the name of it and that I liked it for that very reason.)  While I don’t recall all of the specifics now, I can tell you that each argument has a premise & conclusion, and then there’s that whole fallacy thing that shows the conclusion is not supported by the premise.  Even though I’m not an expert, I’m going to go out on a limb here & state that the conclusion of CCL’s argument is not, in fact, supported by the premise. That is, unless she’s leaving something out. Re-stated, her original argument would be, “Because my cats were pure evil, it could be possible that I shrunk.” To me, that screams false. Only if her argument was, “Because my cats were pure evil and used a butcher knife to chop off pieces of my leg, it could be possible that I shrunk.” would it seem like a sound argument to me.

Since that is not the case, my conclusion is going to be that she still just sucks at segues & casual conversation. Fallacy that.