The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [7]
To respect the maxim at polite behavior’s core: Do not embarrass the other person. Analyst Robin Lakoff explained the logic behind the three styles of being polite:
Don’t impose (distance)—formal
Give options (deference)—hesitant, euphemistic
Be friendly (camaraderie)—direct
Being deferentially friendly is the definitely maybe of getting along, and entails contradictions, since manners are asymmetrical and often what is polite for speakers to imply would be rude for listeners to say. (“Won’t you have some juice?” versus “I want some juice.”) As a consequence, in super-polite company, the nuances can be a veritable merry-go-round of implication and suggestion, as my dad found when he was a relatively uncouth English child visiting well-drilled cousins in 1950s South Africa. After a month he worked out that the correct answer to “Would you like some salt?” was not “No, thank you” but “May I pass it to you?”
In varying degrees, such push-me-pull-you diplomacy underpins all conversational exchanges; it is how we broker relationships. Therefore local differences, however filigree, are worth mastering. Alas, cultural variations are complicated by a further factor: scale. Where openness is sensible in small communities, in larger ones it becomes a liability. It cannot pay to be on nodding acquaintance with everyone in town—you’d dislocate your neck—or to ask the whole street in for tea—how could you trust them not to filch the kettle?
And if cunning is useful in towns, ignoring seems to make more sense in large multicultural cities, because stealth requires expertise; however, when norms are so diverse that a smile can be a come-on to one person and a taunt to the next, reactions are impossible to predict. So people shut down, conversation shrinks, resulting in a net loss in skill at reading others and self-expression. In such crowds, individuals become isolated and grab what intimacy they can get. The result?
Rudeness (ignoring people) × Rudeness (being too direct) = Rudeness2
Escalating rudeness is a logical outcome, but politeness is surely wiser, and safer.
Politicians extol tolerance, but what a chiseling aspiration this can be, so often freighted with hate. Rather than sympathize, it asks us to put up, shut up. This isn’t sociable: It’s antisocial. But if we don’t socialize, don’t master the reflexes of politic self-correction, we’re stuck with clunking political correctness, which, as Halle Berry said, often seems not sensitive but imposed. And lip service is as unlike to virtue as a fig leaf is to innocence.
We need artful conversation. Cooperation is its operative principle, enthusiasm its divine breath, and its power to raise spirits is supernatural. It can make us not only less socially stupid, but also significantly brainier.
THE MIND MECHANIC
Some proclaim the Internet a great oom-pah-pah for literacy. Regardless of whether you see bloggers as scapegrace ego-casters or Samuel Pepys’s worthy heirs, solo self-expression is feeble at training minds, the workhorses of communication. Linguist William Labov caused blushes when he analyzed recordings from different classes and settings:
The highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences [appeared] in the proceedings of learned academic conferences.
It’s no fluke that the monologue-asteries of lab and library nurture woolly jargon. Talking distills thoughts (we know they’re unclear by the befuddled look on the other person’s face) and book learning is harder to absorb than education through conversation. What’s less well known is that studying the craft of conversation improves thinking all round.
In the late 1990s sample groups of eight- to eleven-year-old British schoolchildren took a course of Talk Lessons. Afterward they accounted for thoughts as other classmates did not, more often using words like “because,” “if,” and “why.” Tellingly,