The Doppler Effect

Friday morning I took our dog Xena (Warrior Princess) for a walk through Fort Mitchell. We were coming down Dixie Highway, walking on the sidewalk that was WITH traffic, when a car passed by us from behind and a teenage boy leaned out of the window of the passenger's seat and shouted a sentence of several words in length. He then shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows as if he were waiting for an answer. I immediately noticed two problems with this feeble communication attempt.

1. I couldn't understand a word this person shouted to me. Thanks to the Doppler Effect I heard a high pitched, indistinguishable voice followed by a single understandable phoneme (the short "a" sound) followed by a low pitched indistinguishable voice. As I said above, I could tell by his inflection and body language that he was saying several words, but that's about all I could say for sure. If I'd been a woman I think I would have assumed that he was making some sexual comment about my hind side, but since I'm not a woman I have no idea what he was saying to me. He might have been trying to tell me that my dog was dragging and needed a break (She did.) or that I looked ridiculous wearing shirts, shorts, and shoes with three different shades of olive (I did and didn't care) or he could have thought that I was someone he knew and maybe was trying to say something witty to that person or maybe he was just shouting an insult at a random stranger for no particular reason (Haven't we all done THAT before?) Or heck, I don't know, maybe he WAS making a sexual comment about my hind side. My point is that I don't really know.

2. Even if I HAD understood him, I couldn't have responded to him. By the time he finished saying whatever it was he was saying to me the car he was in was forty yards down the road. By the time I would have processed what he had to say and come up with a response he would have been twice that far down the road. There is no way that I could have replied to whatever it was he said. Was I supposed to drop the dog's leash and take off running after the car he was in so that I could reply?

All of which has led me to a conclusion: Attempting a conversation with a pedestrian from the window of a moving car is probably not the best method of communication.