The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [89]
The host, a relative, smiled wanly. I pictured the man’s friends: all strangers, innocent all.
There seem to be growing numbers of UEs; barricaded in industry jargon, gazing down from high pulpits of data, the frail body of their opinion studded with spurious fact. They may not mean to condescend, they may even be clever, but they’re too daft to get along. Theirs is an infallible system for avoiding threatening meetings of equals, but as conversation, a cheat. Or worse. After the funeral of a doctor, fellow medics approached the bereaved family and, fishing for something to say, inquired about the sudden illness, then outlined in clinical detail exactly how she would have died.
Tactics: UEs are easily flattered, and easily led by questions. If he means well, you might joshingly suggest your interest in Albanian abattoirs is limited. If not, don’t josh.
Pluses: A learning opportunity. Maybe.
14
SHUT-UP SHOP On How to Wage a Word War
Remember those hopeless insults? Custard pies that boomeranged back, splat, on you?
When sorely tried, letting rip may feel deeply satisfying, but ultimately, like swearing or smacking a child, it’s a loser’s game. Far smarter is playwright Alan Bennett’s policy:
I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
There is an art to verbal sallies. While the right put-down is glorious, the wrong one is shaming. An ex-colleague once made the office cringe by boasting of her triumph over a youth who had been slow to admit selling her a grubby pair of shoes. “This is why you are a shop assistant,” she told him, “and I am a manager.” (She worked in publicity.)
If cruelty will show you up, showing you can’t take it is little less damaging to prestige. The best policy is to rise above it, like Ivan Vasiliev, a dainty Belarussian ballet dancer known as “the boy who can fly,” who confessed to measuring his stature daily,
because I have the complex of a small man! In the Bolshoi they have many tall men, so they’re always telling me I’m small.
Did he punch them?
No. I just do something that they could never do.
If flight is beyond you, try a sharp retort—not so much cutting as polished. When words are weapons, counterintelligence spares pain, and it saved lives in ancient Arabia. Before storming into battle, scimitars a-bristle, opposing tribes would send forth their best satirist for a poetic slanging match. This not only dictated morale, but often, if the loser suffered a rout, his tribe would slope off without further ado.
Similarly, the ideal rejoinder muzzles the opposition. I know: I suffered the stiletto of Yorkshire wit, William Hague. I was at Associated Newspapers, waiting for the elevator, when I glanced down into the atrium and spotted the young politician’s gleaming pate. It was 1997, Labour had just swept to power, Hague aspired to be Tory party leader, and to that end, I assumed, he had come to woo the influential editor of the Daily Mail.
There was something mournful in how Hague sat, alone on the bench, no retinue in tow; like an old codger watching pigeons in the park, or a miscreant schoolboy awaiting a caning. Naturally, I pointed this out to passers-by.
“Look, there’s William Hague. Isn’t he sad?”
Finally the elevator came, stuffed with journalists. My friend Vince walked out.
“Hey,” I said. “You see Hague sitting down there, all by himself? Tragic!”
Vince widened his eyes then fled. Puzzled, I entered the elevator.
A familiar voice spoke. “He’s not alone anymore.”
I, alone, laughed.
I cannot guarantee your sallies will attain Hague’s élan, but a little effort can kick-start invective kung fu, and help avert that baleful esprit d’escalier, that sense of opportunity lost, which Mark Twain captured in his definition of repartee: