The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [62]
Value by association
The language of hope gums together spurious marketing claims. Regard with caution: “help,” “like,” “virtually,” “acts,” “works to,” “can,” “up to,” “as much as,” “looks like,” “fortified,” “enriched,” “strengthened,” “fights,” “combats.” (All code for: “But not quite what you’d like it to do.”)
You too!
Projecting the weakness of your case onto someone else. For example, the man accused of racism accuses his accuser of discrimination.
Minimization
So it was your first time. So you only broke one teacup. So? You broke it. (My catchphrase as a toddler: “Didn’t mean to, doesn’t matter.”)
Straw doll
Redescribing someone’s position to make it seem weaker: “You want to spend all day getting dusty and thirsty and burned?”
“No, I want to go to the beach.” “Oh.”
TYPOLOGY OF BORES, CHORES, AND OTHER CONVERSATIONAL BEASTS
THE INSINUATOR Iago scabpickus
Are you haunted by the third person? During arguments, does the same third party’s name keep popping up? “She said you like mountaineering.” “He told me vintage jewelry is for cheapskates.” “She said you said that I said I didn’t like her. . . .”
This person is the Insinuator, often a nimble youngest child, schooled in sowing discord, using elder siblings as Trojan horses for advancing his own agendas.
Fishing techniques differ: Some Insinuators favor hooks, some flies; some scratch their catch’s belly. But all want something, if only a reaction. To that end, annoyingly—this being the point—they’ll assume private knowledge of your desires and dreams, then poke holes in them. Common baits are under-the-rib comments: “Bet you didn’t like that,” “Supposed to look that way?” or “You scrub up well.”
The Insinuator believes himself a politician. In fact, he missed his vocation on the stage. This is never more evident than when he’s delivering what he considers bad news. It isn’t his voice, good though this usually is, soft as a velvety paw, the merest gleam of a claw in its anticipation of your reaction to what, sadly, he must impart.... No, it’s how he engineers the blanks between words. The Insinuator is a Pinteresque purveyor of pauses—extended to span canyons, which panicked listeners populate with Bosch-like visions of horror.
The good news is the script usually falls short of its ... dramatic . . . punctuation. No news can be that bad.... Can it?
Tactics: The lever of his power is irritation, so meet taunt with tease; he’ll rise like a neurotic trout.
Pluses: If the Insinuator is hard to spot initially, once a victim, you won’t forget.
10
PILLOW TALK On the Languages of Love
Once, conversation was a dirty word, embracing every form of congress of the flesh. The association remains fitting. The way to a heart may lie through the stomach, but more potent are those aphrodisiacs fed via the eyes and ears.
Among the craftiest seducers were courtesans, prized since the hetaerae of Ancient Greece for their limber minds as much as their pliant morals. Many were poets, but their finest art was sales. Elizabethan traveler Thomas Coryat warned of the Venetian hired siren’s
hart-tempting harmony of voice.... A good Rhetorician, and a most elegant discourser . . . shee will assay thy constancy with her Rhetoricall tongue.
Nineteenth-century grande horizontale Esther Guimond remarked that it was strange “that we courtesans alone be worthy and able to converse with philosophers.” But nothing pricks desire sharper than our erotic dream machine, the imagination, and ingenuity at caressing it upped a lady’s price. And if agile tongues open purses, they engorged minds in the salon of her rival, La Païva, according to poet Théophile Gautier: “Conversation was always sparkling, original, rich in unheard-of ideas and expressions.”
In our noisy world, words still arouse: Sex phone lines prove it. Yet when we like someone, we’re often tongue-tied by nerves and adrenaline, elemental to sexual chemistry, and worry about finding the right words. This can be enough to silence us.