The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [13]
Thanks to globalization, a vast array of options beckons, with a profusion of gestures, from high-fives to Continental high society’s hovering Handkuss (uh-uh—no lips on Her Serenity’s glove). Yet on closer inspection, amazingly few fit general use. Recall the nose-clash as you misjudge which cheek to kiss. The pause as you open a door, the other person hesitates, then you both walk into each other.
Confusion reigns because social codes are fading, and etiquette increasingly resembles a branch of astrology. Change is nothing new, but the information age has scrambled the software that programs how we behave, multiplying distortions. We don’t just copy our parents; we cut and paste from Web, film, and TV. And although each walk of life looks increasingly the same, nuances proliferate and instincts are less instructive—fashion shifts too fast. (Try high-fiving a teenager and watch him sneer.)
Nevertheless, we form assumptions about personalities from the briefest encounter. I was utterly thrown when a business contact shook hands with her left paw (not coincidentally, she is a demon negotiator). Even with people we see all the time, jarring notes magnify into signs. Aren’t you disconcerted by your Andalusian pal’s earsplitting air-smackeroos? The weirdo who winks when you buy milk at his shop? The aunt who still pinches cheeks? The tennis partner whose grip is like a drowning man’s?
➺ Rule three: The first notes you strike should be on a general frequency
Common sense ceases to exist when the pool of local certainties is awash with every other drop in the ocean. On the other hand, as your parents might have indicated, common sense has always been a thing of the past.
One answer to the dilemma is to ditch greetings. Another is to get arty and improvise. Sure, you could twirl someone instead of shaking her hand (it happened to me). But why heap confusion upon confusion?
Trusty product of countless exchanges, the standard-issue gestures—the smile, the handshake—are already an amazing collective work of art, and evolved as they have for good reason. What is more, your opening—“Hi” or “Howdie?”—is already a bold tick in the social register, enough information for now, surely. This should be the easy bit.
➺ Rule four: Smiling is a confidence trick
It is apt that the first self-help guide, imaginatively titled Self-Help, should have been written by Samuel Smiles. Far from meek, anthropologists reckon baring teeth is as much designed to show yourself as an adversary with bite as to express warm feelings.
Our cousin the chimpanzee peels back his lips to warn of danger—suggesting that, as well as gently intimidating, the smile helpfully muzzles its wearer’s fear; a confidence-boosting reflex, like giggling at splatter movies. Certainly, it is an assertion, bold, hardly modest, and some cultures prefer ladies to titter, a demure hand over lowered mouth. Admittedly, Tudor aristocrats had a brief grinning craze, when on-trend dames showed off blackened teeth to prove they were rich enough to rot them on costly sugar (and some resorted to fake blacking). But don’t be put off. As Horace observed,
Smiling faces are turned on those who smile.
If you smile, the other person, unless very odd or hostile, will feel compelled to return it, for no other reason than that the mimicry instinct is so entrenched that smiles and laughter are contagious. (A 1962 hysteria epidemic in Tanganyika took two years’ quarantine to stamp out.)
➺ Rule five: Eyes make contacts
The Zulu have an elegant phrase for hello and good-bye: Sawu bona—“I see you.” This encapsulates the power of greeting: It gives recognition. Not looking at the other person while doing it renders him invisible, implicitly declaring that either you’re afraid to meet his eye or he is beneath your contempt. Either way, it’s bad manners, making you seem weak or pompous—a worse weakness still for making conversation.