TMI – or TLC ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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14 November

In imitation of do (or did) they know what, maybe people still dismiss others with ‘Too much information’ (or write TMI), a retort to interrupt further revelation of the preceding speaker’s (or writer’s) sex-life, personal habits, or feelings, but I like to think that those days may be past.

If they are, it will just have been through boredom, through the phrase becoming passé, not because of those so confronted coming back – as they should have done ¬– with FBR, where ‘R’ stands for ‘Rude’. When the information really is ‘too much’, because someone is talking about his latest Bob Dylan CD when no one has any interest in it, the phrase seems strangely inapt.

Then, though, it would really be information, about the use of guitar on track 4, or Dylan’s lyrics or vocal style, whereas I never heard the blunt use of the words to silence someone boringly talking about a topic, only as a put-down in mock horror for what had been divulged.

What is really bad about it is that it cannot bother to be a full sentence, e.g. You are giving me too much information, as if one would say Corny old joke, rather than That’s a corny one !.

So it is the smugness that I object to, the outright declaration that it is TMI, not just, in some cases, that person’s interpretation. And, for me, the impact that it might have on someone who does not find this world easy to live in.

If people still said TLC, perhaps they could employ that instead as an approach…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)