The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [18]
If people only spoke when they had something to say, the human race would soon lose the power of speech.
➺ Rule one: Small talk conjures intimacy
Anthropologists liken small talk to grooming among primates, largely because it stimulates the snug sense of belonging that makes socializing a joy. Likewise, some academics stick it in a narrow box marked “phatic” speech, those remarks meaningful less for what they say than for what they signal. For instance, idle comments about weather are phatic because their meaning isn’t the information they contain—anyone can see it’s a lovely day—so much as what they signal about the speakers’ relationship: emphatically, you’re on friendly terms.
This view minimizes small talk’s multifangled role as conversation’s warm-up act. Robert Louis Stevenson explained:
A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue.
Not only does small talk enable the big by scouting topics, but it sets conversation’s tone, pace, and rhythm; scanning sensibilities, locking on to affinities, massaging minds and goodwill. All of which makes it a virtuoso instrument of social orchestration. What’s not to like?
First, we do it most among strangers. Second, it can feel pointless. (The softer the topic, the harder the sell.) Third, it is bitty, quick-fire, demanding disproportionate amounts of energy, rather like badminton, and pressure to perform may be cramping. (Who enjoys sparkling to order?) Fourth, as we send out grappling hooks, we expose ourselves, and if our offers are rejected, we feel rejected. It’s a striptease-cum-beauty contest.
This is why even Lady Florence Bell—a tireless Edwardian promoter of conversation, who launched Winter Gardens for the poor to congregate in on dark, lonely nights, away from the demon drink, and who was so far from shy that, by her daughter’s account, she treated life as a play with “herself . . . the leading personage in the drama”—even she so loathed small talk, so yearned for set phrases to stand in for it, like the preordained pieties that nuns “are obliged to say” if paths crossed at the convent, that she wrote a ridiculous book of them, Conversational Openings and Endings.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The honor of small talk lies in paying others the compliment that they’re worth talking to, the power in sparking the everyday magic of intimacy. Hell when it fails, it is eminently worth doing well, as the intimidated financial company directors understood.
THE RISE OF SMALL TALK
While most Anglo-Saxons joke about mothers-in-law, native Australians have “mother-in-law” tongues, with dedicated vocabularies for use on taboo females. But such impressive verbal voodoo is fading along with other formal and deferential modes.
People are different, and it’s daft to treat everyone the same, as did Sir Walter Ralegh’s brother Dr. Gilbert, “a Man of excellent naturall Parts” who “cared not what he said to man or woman of what quality soever,” winning himself the accolade of sixteenth-century Britain’s “Greatest Buffoon in the Nation.” Yet growing numbers of us opt for the buffoon stance.
Psychologist Steven Pinker observed:
Younger Americans try to maintain lower levels of social distance. . . . I know many gifted prose stylists my age whose one-on-one speech is peppered with sort of and you know, their attempt to avoid affecting the stance of the expert.
It’s not just to be cool; in multicultural settings, hooked up through global commerce, or at international conferences such as the esteemed Pinker attends, user-friendly, low-key lingo translates more readily. But artful small talk is defter at making friends than what Chesterfield belittled as “sort of chit-chat.” Or any other, kind of, like, you know, verbal padding.
➺ Rule two: Artful small talk is the social compass
Rather than assume intimacy through blunt language, small talk creates