Talking Through Your Teeth

There are certain things that seem completely normal to us, but in actuality are quite strange. If we could view our lives objectively, with no bias, and a mind with no prior knowledge, we'd probably think ourselves to be insane, demented freaks with horrifying social practices.

There's a lot of parts of our lives that this can be applied to, such as the fact that we drink the juice that comes out of fat black and white creatures that destroy our atmosphere with their own farts, or the fact that we consider two of society's most basic and important bodily needs to be taboo and unmentionable, but one of my favorites is the way we talk. No, not our speech patterns, but the way we move our mouths to say things.

I want you to try something. Go about your day, saying everything you would normally say, but don't ever fully open your mouth. Keep your teeth together and only move your lips. You'll find that this is actually quite easy to do, and there are few words where you will need to change this habit. So why do we bother to open our mouths all the way when we don't need to?

The answer is very simple: Because you look like an idiot. Seriously, take a look in the mirror while you do this. You look like someone who was dropped on the kitchen floor too many times as a child or possibly someone who had their teeth super-glued together. But the interesting thing is, we only think this is weird because we don't do it all the time. It does sort of make sense, but we don't talk like that, so anyone who does will be berated for looking like a chimpanzee on methamphetamine.

Some day, once we've established contact with the other civilizations of the universe, some aliens that look almost identical to us will land here, take one look at us talking like we do, and never come back. God, we are such freaks.