“Thank you for joining me for breakfast, Rarity. Spike’s been sleeping in lately, making my mornings a bit boring,” said the purple unicorn.
“Oh, thank you for being such a gracious host, Twilight! I can hardly believe that it has been a whole week since we last had a thorough discussion. Time away from an intelligent pony in a town like Ponyville wears me down,” replied the white unicorn as her perfectly styled, deep purple mane bounced up and down with her enthusiasm. “Really, Twilight, I can hardly believe how well you took moving to Ponyville from Canterlot. I dream of the city enough as it is.”
Twilight sat a charred tea kettle in front of her dramatizing friend, who then fixed her gaze on the kettle. “Eh, we’ve talked about it before. I wasn’t much for the other ponies back then, and I’m sure the ponies of Canterlot make it what it is. The sights were definitely different, but I spent too much time studying to really remember them. I don’t even think I ever cleaned the windows in my old library.” Rarity paid little attention to Twilight as her expression slowly changed from happiness to contempt for the blackened tea kettle. It had never been cleaned, and Twilight used it too often to take time off of her schedule to clean it. One could hardly tell it was supposed to be a beautifully decorated antique.
Rarity’s astute diction soon began. “Twilight, you really ought to clean this kettle. It has so much… potential. Just look at the poor thing! It’s all black, and charred, and burnt, and… well I shan’t be repeating myself, I did tell you to look at it, didn’t I?” Rarity motioned to the kettle with her hooves in an imploring manner. “Why, I could only imagine the kind of work put into such a poor little thing meant to be abused.” Both she and Twilight got closer to the steaming kettle, studying the bits of white, green, and pink still visible on its handle. “This design was embossed on the ceramic and cooked onto it, color and all. Look! It wasn’t painted, either.”
Twilight, after examining the kettle for herself, made an interjection before things got out of hand. She put her left hoof on Rarity, closed her eyes, and spoke to defuse, “We can clean it later, Rarity. It’s filled with steaming hot tea, which we’re supposed to be drinking right now, remember?”
Rarity backed down to a normal sitting posture and beamed with delight again. “Oh, yes, how could I have forgotten? Shall we?” Within, and without, she still pitied the kettle with her eyes. Twilight thought she wouldn’t let go of the kettle until it was clean; Rarity often acted like that if there was nothing else important to do. Twilight wizardly lifted a pair of cups over from a drawer in the library onto the table in the centre, near which they were seated. With this newfound distraction, Rarity studied the teacups as Twilight lifted the charred kettle and poured tea into them. She found them quaint; not so much that they were unusual, but that they were unusually usual for Rarity. She also found from their flawless white surface that they were well-crafted.
Twilight, now engaged in a great discourse with Rarity’s attentions, “Soo, Rarity, what’s been keeping you the past week?” Twilight’s words seemed to push Rarity’s expression flat; for Twilight, this was a remarkable victory. Consequently, Rarity deadpanned, “Oh, the fabulous, wonderful repetition of rethreading the sunshine and happiness back into an awry shipment of teal, green, and yellow cloths. You know, the usual… right?” Twilight understood, that by adding “the usual”, Rarity meant that she was making something unusual. Twilight concurred, “Yes, that’s what you usually do, but it usually doesn’t keep you for weeks at a time,” ending her line with a sip of tea.
Rarity looked up at Twilight, donning a nearly shameful expression. “Well, I guess I should explain the special discordance of the situation…see, you know how it is, my work is hard, and it’s in the middle of the season, so I have few customers, so I am running out of bits. This season is being especially harsh… so…”
Rarity’s long pause was suspenseful for Twilight, who had poured her expression over Rarity for them having been out of contact for a week. Twilight’s eagerness didn’t make Rarity’s shame any easier to take. She bit her lip, sipped some tea, spaced out a moment, and finally flattened out her flattering expressions so she could finally say, “Twilight, I am making trash bags.”
Twilight shrunk back, quickly drank her tea, re-filled her teacup, sipped one more time, and finally looked back at Rarity with a sheepish smile. Twilight was visibly hiding the hilarity of the situation. She didn’t find it funny that Rarity was making trash bags; she found it funny that Rarity was ashamed of making trash bags and that apparently stylish trash bags were the only thing Rarity could reliably sell. After a dozen seconds of smiling at Rarity, whose expression effortlessly mirrored hers, she motioned her hoof in a manner that said, “Go on. I’m listening.” Rarity sighed the moment she saw her friend’s sheepish smile change into a look of genuine concern.
Rarity then went on, “Well, I guess. It wasn’t my idea. I got an offer from Mayor Mare to fashion re-usable trash bags as a paying job. Honestly, I thought she was joking, but my sister insisted on taking the job. She said it was the… ‘smart thing to do’ after I learned that it was, in fact, not a joke by accepting the contract. She got a good lecture after that…”
Twilight then made a remark intending to cheer Rarity up, “Well, I’d say that does sound like the smart thing to do, if you’re out of bits.” Rarity’s responding expressions, however, indicated that this motion had gone horribly wrong. Rarity, however, being a true lady to her friends, tried to avoid the subject at hoof and go back to the more comfortably intellectual discussion of making fabulous trash bags.
After her face flashed a mere moment of pure disgust, Rarity beamed again at Twilight, and spoke with a very polite tone, “Oh, Twilight, it wasn’t so bad. You know, I had never thought about why all trash bags were black before then. At first, I thought it was just because of how they were made, but after examining my own trash bags, I really started to think it over. You see, I think most trash bags are black because the original intention was for nothing to be so gladly thrown away, and for what was so dreadful for to be thrown away to be in a veil. And, Night’s veil is its darkness, and if something gets so dark, it becomes black. So it would make sense for ponies to want to throw their dreadful things away in the best understood veil of night which would make all things black, for what is inside to be never seen again and never thought about again. But times have changed, you know? I find throwing things away to be a happy exercise; getting rid of the old, in with the new, and that’s why all of my trash bags were colorfully styled!” Having ended on a mighty note, she looked at Twilight with a doubtful look, then paused and asked, “Does that make sense, Twilight?”
Twilight was befuddled. She was a quick study, but ponies aren’t books. She had never thought that Rarity was so smart. “I never thought you were so smart, Rarity. I mean, I guess I suppose I always thought you were observant, and cultured, but you got all of that from looking at a trash bag? On a whim? You’re so smart, Rarity!” Twilight seemed overjoyed at this newfound discovery. She could find that Rarity was so smart, and repeat it over and over until Rarity thanked her for it.
However, this was the last straw for Rarity. Obviously, she thought, Twilight doesn’t know what she’s saying. She just couldn’t let Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn she admired at times, express such dear naiveté. She was not disgusted at all now; no, but she was condescending in expression and speech as she said, “Twilight, dear, you keep using that word… I don’t think it means what you think it means. That I am ‘smart’, you say. Now, don’t act coy with me! I, Rarity, am intelligent and refined and cultured in my wisdom, and highly reputable; I am not… ‘smart’, as you say. I would dare not ever use such a simple word to describe myself, nor would I any pony I intend to compliment. Humph!”
Twilight was devastated. She hesitated to reply, and when she did open her trap to rebuff Rarity, she found herself pulled back by doubt. She had read every dictionary in her library just over 90 times, and she had over 12 other volumes on the connotations and denotations of words. How could she miss a definition of a word? A word so simple as “Smart”, no less? She was dumbstruck. She decided to say to Rarity, “I must be missing something here,” as she magically uprooted her most trustworthy volumes from the shelves and flip through them one by one; naturally, Twilight trusted a lot of books. Rarity was amused by this gesture, mostly because she was surprised she did not expect it.
“Here,” cheered Twilight, as she gestured with a hoof on a page of an encyclopedia and read off of it, “’Smart is another word for intelligence.’ Well… what? I guess I didn’t use it correctly, but, ‘I find your smart impressive’ doesn’t make any sense!” Twilight continued to shift through book after book at lightning speed, getting more worried and confused as she flung each one into a pile on the floor in frustration. Rarity trotted up to Twilight and interrupted her search, “Twilight, why don’t you let me explain?”
Twilight stopped and look expectantly at Rarity. Rarity closed her eyes, and spoke, “I don’t think it would matter what a book says about a word; further, definitions are written for all to read and all to understand the same way… ‘Smart’ is not. That’s an odd word, you know? It has many ‘definitions’, and it’s used so often amongst the common-folk that they’ve all gone and made mush out of it. What it means to one pony could mean so precisely something else to a different pony. I suppose you could find elegance in that; communicating a simple word for a complex idea that differs for all. The Canterlot elite and I, however, agree that ‘Smart’ is a failure of a word. It is a failure because it is so unrefined and inaccurate about so unrefined and inaccurate topics. You may mean smart to be similar to ‘intelligence’, but just how similar? And to what extent? Why an extent? And then, what else does it mean, and just what does ‘intelligence’ mean? Or any other suitable word that could be used to define ‘Smart’? I’m sure you understand now, Twilight.”
Twilight lightly nodded towards Rarity. “I guess so. I can see how it would complicate things if a simple word contained a complex word in its definition.”
Rarity made a quick rebuke. “Aha! Abandon that again; abandon defining ‘Smart’. It’s a word that speaks for itself, and it speaks volumes about the speaker and how much they do not know about how to properly communicate. As far as a word for a word goes, it has… no ‘definition’; it’s like a blank parchment, free for the listeners to write on. A pony should always dictate accurately and precisely; never leave anything open to interpretation lest you come across as a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded!”
Twilight was again befuddled. “Wow, you really are smart… Oh, sorry. I mean… you really are intelligent, though I always knew you were wise. I guess this proves all of that.”
Rarity smiled and nodded at Twilight. She drank the rest of her tea, and lifted the tea kettle in order to pour more, though she noticed it was empty… and she noticed it. “Oh! Why had you not cleaned this poor kettle before, Twilight? I should get to that right away!”
Twilight giggled at Rarity’s gratuitousness, and attempted to imitate her speech. “Oh, well, I guess I had never been so wise as to predict your tomfoolery over a tea kettle I use every morning.”
