The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [42]
SHOWGIRL Ostentatrix ludi
You smile. She laughs. You say she looks well. She says you look incredible. You have a new job. She just bought her company. Going on holiday? Guess who is heading into tax exile....
Showgirl understands that life is competition. Anything you can do, she does it better, with knobs on, and glitter, and if you’re lucky, lucky, lucky, she will tell you how.
Men, call them Preens, employ similar methods. But Showgirl respects a distinctly feminine tradition. If she had an emblem it would be a tiny silver spade, disguised as an accessory. Although insecure to the bottom of her high-kicking heels, she never undermines directly. Rather, she takes every opportunity to smuggle information into conversation to big herself up, most perfidious, as a worry preying on her mind. Will her cloth-of-gold gown shed dodo feathers at the Academy Awards? Will she be shuttlesick on her voyage to Venus? Will that rock star stop trying to convince her he isn’t gay?
Invariably thrilled to hear your plans, Showgirl does all she can to advance your cause. But isn’t it odd how often she converts your news into ways she can be of help?
You’ll never leave her company walking taller. That little spade builds her foundations by nicking earth from yours.
Tactics: Isn’t it gratifying she wants to impress you? Her machinations are also painfully informative, given she targets your weaknesses: Listen for what riles you and you’ll hear your insecurities talking. With this guide, set about shoring up your perimeter walls.
Pluses: There is something breathtakingly brazen in how Showgirl boosts her interests. Such focus, drive, chutzpah: useful armor, and worth assuming from time to time.
6
INTO THE GROOVE On Steering Controls
If having nothing to say is bad, too much is possibly worse. Millionaire American politico and doer-of-good Arianna Huffington “bubbles over with questions”:
“Do you like to dance?” “Can we talk about perfumes?” “Do you think the breast stroke is more feminine than the crawl?” “Do you like Leonard Cohen?” “What do you think of my lipstick?”
She says this is all part of her innate “capacity for intimacy.”
But gush and it may wash over them.
“Only connect,” wrote E. M. Forster in Howards End: a motto for life, but it does as well for conversation. At its best, in animating our views, conversation reveals who we are, and when sympathies chime, we relate to one another. Slipping between topics makes connecting possible.
Even military men should cut a tippy-toed dash. Captain Orlando Sabertash’s 1842 gent’s conduct book advocates
a graceful and pleasing manner . . . from “grave to gay, from serious to serene.”
Sound silly? Think of a person you met recently. Do you remember what was said or how you felt talking to him? Emotion dwells in the memory longer than the neatest verbal twist, and whatever topic you discuss, conversation’s visceral pleasure emanates less from the beauty of words than the harmony of its pace, rhythm, and flow.
➺ Rule one: Flowing topics smooth social dynamics
Jumpy talkers unsettle us by darting from topic to topic, like squirrels in a forest fire. Wordsworth’s friend, the opium eater Thomas de Quincey, suggested all would run smoother if we appointed a “symposiarch.” A similar approach is used to broker talk in fashionable “dialogue” workshops, at which mediators instruct speakers to pass batons, even bananas, to divvy up airtime (only the banana-clutcher may speak). But isn’t that bananas? Think what is lost if you can’t share the insight a remark has sparked, or overlap sentences—in terms of spontaneity, ideas, momentum, connection . . .
Like the industrious fairy-tale gnome Rumpelstiltskin, who spun straw into gold, dexterous talkers transmute dross subjects to dazzle by spinning threads that draw people together and lead to new treasures. But magical as it may sometimes seem, conversation’s flow proceeds by cues and signals little more complex than traffic lights. However, because we follow them, like rules