The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [33]
I remember the call from a friend.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
The moment stretched.
“Silence,” she said, by way of prompt.
Rude as it seemed, my silence wasn’t empty, but clamorous with questions and emotions. So I quickly said, “Wow. Are you happy?” Then immediately wished I hadn’t.
Rather than let silence get the better of you, appreciate the virtue in its flexibility: a communication tool that’s as versatile as the queen in chess. Heed Benjamin Franklin:
As we must account for every idle word, so we must account for every idle silence.
Which sounds onerous, but on the contrary, you’ve everything to gain. Discreet conversational omissions can fuel thought, exercise tact, prompt laughter, drama, flush people out, and push prices up, or down, swifter than any fast-talk. Or as Aelfric Bata, tenth-century monk, teacher, and midget (proudly signing work brevissimus monachus) scolded novices:
It is stupidity to be so talkative and full of words. Chattering garrulity and garrulous chattering are hateful to God.
➺ Rule three: Be a connoisseur of pauses
Listen carefully and dumb silence tells you plenty—after all, the pause is for thought.
Two kinds occur in speech: for breath or hesitation. Only around one in twenty are the former, because respiration automatically slows when we talk. (Maybe the abbreviated monk Bata was right, chatterboxes really are dumber, their poor gray cells starved of oxygen.) Often these fall at grammatical breaks, where in writing would be punctuation.
Far more suggestive are hesitation pauses, which comprise between a third and half of ordinary speech, and can pop up anywhere in a sentence, grammar be damned. And, despite our popular mistrust of halting talkers, linguists judge hesitations as marks of “superior” spontaneous speech; like fins breaking the water’s surface, they indicate thoughts snapping and circling, as speakers plan ahead.
Whereas, for at least one disgruntled academic, smooth talk betrays a phoney:
Either [speech] has been rehearsed beforehand, or the speaker is merely stringing together a number of standard phrases she habitually repeats, as when the mother of the 7-year-old who threw a stone through my window rattled off at top speed, “I do apologise, he’s never done anything like that before, I can’t think what came over him, he’s such a good quiet little boy usually, I’m quite flabbergasted.”
So don’t be down on gappy talkers. Rather than indicate hedging, their broken sentences may stake out high-grade truths.
Alternatively, they could be super-manipulators. Masters of silence may be taken for master talkers—not always a mistake. Infinitely foxy French statesman Talleyrand sat up at night, polishing his epigrams. Then he
would often sit through a party without saying a word, but then suddenly come out with a sentence which people said was the sort they never forgot.
Well-honed shafts of wit strike harder, resonate further, than buck-shot bon mots because listeners must give greater weight to each word (as a cracking twig can convince the lone traveler that a host of dangers lurk in the shadows).
Notice how speakers use controlled pauses, like stage managers, to prompt others to talk, to clarify meaning, to increase drama or suspense. A pause may say, “Wasn’t that something!” or “Listen up!” Or draw attention to what a speaker isn’t saying, inviting listeners to fill in—as wicked Iago does throughout Shakespeare’s play Othello, misleading the imaginative Moor. Or mark a channel hop, as a speaker brakes before—ahem—changing subject.
Frequently pauses are tacit invitations to others to speak. If unsure whether you’re being asked to leap in, note turn-taking’s three laws:
If a speaker invites another to speak, he must stop and let the other start.
If nobody has been invited, anyone can speak next.
If nobody volunteers or has been selected, the speaker may go on (but is not obliged to).
➺ Rule four: Use pauses creatively
Investigation into music’s physiological effects has found that listeners’ pleasure and relaxation peaked, if that