Interesting

as in

"Do you want to hear something interesting?"

Variations: "That’s interesting .... I heard / read / saw something interesting ... met someone very interesting today."

The heart sinks immediately, doesn’t it? Prepare yourself to be heartily amused .... not. Oh, it can be fun in a vague sort of way to see him wrinkling his brow and getting all excited about something new for a change. It brings out the little boy in him, which was one of his best features in the beginning.

But what is going to be the object of his vibrancy this time? Please not some complicated tale of chicanery at work in which he and a half dozen of his colleagues have spent a whole morning labouring over a problem that you could have solved on your own while doing your makeup.

Nor another daft article from a magazine / newspaper / Chinese fortune cookie or wherever he has been looking for insights into life recently, suggesting that extraterrestrials may be working in the local supermarket, that everyone can lose masses of weight and have a firm stomach in fourteen days or rise from the dead as a 20 year old simply by filling in a coupon (both promises equally absurd), or that couples get along better and stay together longer if the man dominates.

And if it is someone he has met, pray god that he hasn’t asked him round for dinner already because he is most likely to be someone you will want to take a cleaver to in the first five minutes, either because he is a simpering idiot beloved by your partner because he finds everything he says “interesting” or because he immediately bypasses your partner and starts coming on to you. Whatever he has found “interesting” this time, you can be sure that you are going to hear about it at a length that would make the solutions to life’s greatest mysteries sound tedious.

Annoyingly, if he has happened on something of actual value, much of the “interest” is likely to stem from things that you have been telling him, without success, since you met and you will have to refrain from setting him straight for fear of disillusioning him. Viz: “interesting” is not the prelude to much joy.