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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 51: Small talk, big deal

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 51: Small talk, big deal. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 51 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about small talk!

But first, thank you so much to everybody who helped us celebrate our anniversary month in November. We really enjoyed hearing and seeing all of your shares to help other people find the show and be able to listen to a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

Lauren: Most podcasts still find new ears or new eyes, if they have transcripts like ours, by word of mouth. Whether you shared in the anniversary month in November, or you want to share Lingthusiasm at any other time of the year, we’re always incredibly grateful.

Gretchen: This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster, who works for Merriam-Webster, answering patron questions about dictionaries and how they’re made and how words get into them and out of them and all sorts of things in that direction. You can listen to that and a whole bunch of other bonus episodes – almost twice as much Lingthusiasm – by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Hey, Gretchen, how’s your book going?

Gretchen: Oh, well, you know, it’s been out for a bit over a year now. It came out in paperback earlier this year. The media I’ve been doing for it has been dying down, which is nice to take a bit of a break, but people are still tagging me about them reading it on social media, and that’s really nice. What I’ve actually been working on this year has been this series of intro linguistics videos with this big educational YouTube channel, Crash Course – as you know, Lauren, because you’ve been working on it with me.

Lauren: I see that it’s a very well-practised answer to that question.

Gretchen: I mean, it’s a question that people have been asking me for five years now. The answer does keep changing, but I have had a lot of practice.

Lauren: I imagine it’s definitely in high rotation for people making small talk with you.

Gretchen: It’s a good way of getting into this idea of small talk questions – asking about people’s lives – and how we think about what types of things we can use to get into a conversation about how someone’s been doing or what someone’s been doing lately.

Lauren: This kind of small talk is something that is really important for building or maintaining social relationships, whether that is with the waiter at the café you’re at, or with your friends or family members. The name “small” in “small talk” is a little bit misleading because it diminishes what is actually the really important social function of this kind of language where it helps us ease into relationships whether that be with the waiter at our local café or our closest family members and friends.

Gretchen: I think that there’s the sense that small talk is either really easy or really difficult or what’s going on there and can we analyse those types of conversational turns in a linguistically interesting manner. I definitely think we can. I wanna pause and distinguish small talk, which are these questions, “How are things going,” “How’s the book,” “How’s the job,” “How’s the baby,” “How’s living in the place you’re living still,” “How about that local sports team,” “Nice weather we’ve been having lately.” Those are small talk conversations, and they’re not quite as rote as another topic we’ve talked about before, which is phatic expressions. That’s things like, “Hey,” “No problem,” “Bye,” “Thanks,” which are really very rote and very ritualised. When you say, “How’s it going? Good. How are you,” that’s phatic. But when you say, “How are things these days,” and you’re like, “Oh, well, you know, not too much. I’ve been doing this,” that’s when we get into small talk when it’s a little bit more original – but often not that original because you do end up with that certain level of rehearsal.

Lauren: Definitely trodding well-worn ground sometimes in small talk. Sometimes, it can take you in surprising directions. I always find it interesting which topics of conversation are appropriate small talk and how that can vary across different groups of people or entire cultures. It’s part of the whole collection of things that you have to learn about learning a language beyond just learning specific words and sentences. Have you found yourself in the middle of small talk different set of expectations before?

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I always have this experience whenever I manage to successfully make small talk about sports that I feel like I’ve really gotten away with something. Sometimes, I’ll be talking with one person about – in Canada, it’s hockey. Montreal Canadiens have this big hockey game, blah blah blah, this thing happened, or like, Canada versus the US – the Olympics – that hockey game generally makes Canadian news. I’ll learn like, “Oh, it went to overtime and there was this big save at the last minute,” or something like that, and then I’ll get to mine it for small talk for like a week. I always feel like I’ve gotten away with something.

Lauren: Good making use of your limited engagement with sport.

Gretchen: I mean, I don’t engage with sport zero amount of the time, but I definitely don’t have as much deep engagement with sport as a lot of people do. So, I feel like I’ve entered a different world when I manage to have small talk about sport.

Lauren: I always find it interesting how small groups of people have their own expectations about what topics of small talk are appropriate. It’s always really a bit of a relief when you find a social group where they do the same kind of set of hobby references or things like favourite films and TV shows as the basis of small talk. It’s just like, “Ah, okay, this is a conversation that I can easily navigate.” It’s always a delight if you share those media references with people.

Gretchen: It’s really interesting because you can be trapped in that conversation of like, “Oh, here are two people who are just making references from The Office at each other, and I haven’t seen The Office” or insert TV show that’s popular that you haven’t seen. In some cases, you can pick up references. Like, I know all the references from Mean Girls because enough people have seen it. I know all the references from Oregon Trail, that very early video game that people played, even though I never played it because – you know, “You have died of dysentery,” or “So-and-So has died of dysentery,” is just a phrase that gets repeated. So, even though I haven’t played that game, I can make these references to a certain level of depth.

Lauren: Yeah. There’re the small talk topics of conversation and then there’s the media references that you use to build out rapport with people as well, which is another extra level of solidarity building and group building in the small talk process. Sylvia Sierra is a linguist who’s done some really nice work on The Oregon Trail, which is, I assume, why you brought that example up.

Gretchen: Yes, Sylvia Sierra has this great paper that’s about video game references as resources in friend interaction and how people quote video games. Especially, I think it’s like Gen X and Millennials quote video games as part of conversation to shift things into a more playful aspect for a serious topic or ways of maintaining group identity.

Lauren: Listening to how Gen Xers do that and why people do these media references has made me feel a lot less threatened by people who weave poetry or Shakespeare references in. Especially people from a century ago who just add a bit of a Shakespearean subtext to their conversation, it’s like, “Ah, they’re just doing what we do now with The Office.”

Gretchen: It’s the same thing. It’s funny. Speaking of Shakespeare, one play that was really popular during Shakespeare’s era was Troilus and Cressida where you have these two young lovers-ish, and they have this slightly creepy uncle who’s named Pandarus who tries to put them together and get them together. This is where our verb “to pander” comes from.

Lauren: Ah!

Gretchen: It’s actually a very old, embedded media reference that people have forgotten about. I recently read Troilus and Cressida for...reasons, and I was like, “Wait. This is the origin of this.” And you start spotting it in other Shakespeare plays where he has this Troilus and Cressida reference, which is kind of like having a modern play or show or something that’s like, “Oh, my book has a Hamilton reference,” and it’s kind of the equivalent of here’s this popular media property that you do your riff on and that you made clear references for.

Lauren: I feel a lot less cultural insecurity around supposedly high brow stuff like Shakespeare when you start realising the parallels between with how we do quoting of media references these days.

Gretchen: Also, this is something that I bring up a lot when I do media interviews with people who are in a generation or two older from me, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my kids, they just talk in memes now. My teenager, their friends just talk in memes to each other,” and it’s like, “Yeah, they’re just doing media references. When you were their age, you used popular movies or popular songs, and you quoted lines from those. Maybe you quoted lines from Beatles songs or something.” This is the same thing they’re doing except the stuff they’re quoting is memes or popular videos on TikTok or something – or popular gifs – rather than quoting from movies or mass-produced cultural artefacts.

Lauren: Definitely a good way to really make sure your group of people you’re talking to are in on the same page of knowledge.

Gretchen: I think people find it reassuring because it’s like, “Oh, well, quoting movies didn’t destroy society and quoting memes is not gonna do that either.”

Lauren: The flip side of having a small group of people with whom you’ve built small talk on recurring references is when you find yourself in a situation where you and the person you’re talking to just have completely different cultural expectations of how small talk should function. We’ve had an earlier episode about how conversation can vary between people. There’s a much more highly involved style of conversation and there’s much less highly involved style of conversation, but in terms of small talk, we also have different genre expectations about what fits into small talk.

Gretchen: There’s that often-quoted thing about, “You don’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table,” which is not true for everybody, but it’s quoted as a beginner level version of that.

Lauren: We do have an awareness about what we think of as appropriate topics for conversation. I had to really relearn how to do small talk in Nepal because there is a cultural expectation. Some people have talked about it as a genre of your small talk that you do with strangers and people you don’t know very well is a suffering story genre where, to show people how resilient you are, you talk about all the bad things that have happened in your life, whereas my cultural script on this is that you don’t tell strangers all the bad things you don’t want to. There’s a feeling that that is an imposition on someone you don’t know very well to lay out all of your problems in life.

Gretchen: You don’t wanna be seen as a complainer or something.

Lauren: Yeah. I think that’s a feature of small talk that wouldn’t be very controversial to say about Western cultures in general. It really took me a lot of time to get around the fact that people would tell me all these really exhausting terrible events in their lives and not because they wanted anything of me or they wanted me to fix it or feel sorry for them but just that this is the way that you show someone how authentic a person you are.

Gretchen: I think I’ve been in a version of that conversation in Western English-speaking contexts when people start talking about travel problems that they’ve had. Like, “And then MY flight was delayed for three weeks,” you know?

Lauren: I think once that genre does open up for Westerners, there’s a bit of –

Gretchen: One-up-manship?

Lauren: – trying to outdo each other – yeah. The problem when you say these things as big cultural generalisations is like, of course individual conversations don’t bear out like this. But it was really relieving when I started reading some anthropological literature on small talk in Western countries and small talk and genre appropriateness in Nepal and just like, “Ah, this has a name. It’s a known thing that other people have observed this cultural difference as well.”

Gretchen: There’s another genre of small talk which I think of as the “Who’s your father” genre.

Lauren: Um, okay, I have several potential understandings of how that could go. What is this genre?

Gretchen: This is a genre that I grew up with in Nova Scotia which is, when you meet someone, you need to figure out how you may or may not be related to them. Even if you aren’t necessarily related to them by blood, you need to figure out if you are or are not acquainted with some member of their family.

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: I knew growing up in this that in certain contexts I needed to cite my mom’s side of the family or my mom’s mom’s side of the family or my mom’s dad’s side of the family because who do I need to cite so that the person who I’m talking to can place me in this lineage sense. Even now, if I’m talking to relatives, sometimes somebody will come up, and it’ll be like, “Oh, So-and-So – you know them because their kid was your age who you would’ve known blah blah blah.”

Lauren: That is definitely not a small talk genre that I encountered growing up nearly as much as that.

Gretchen: Well, I don’t do it as much now in my daily life living in a city, but there is an academic version of that as well where you meet somebody at an academic conference, and they say, “Oh, I’m a grad student at this university,” and you say, “Oh, who’s your advisor? Do you know So-and-So who I know who works at this university?”

Lauren: Oh my gosh, it’s so funny because when you were talking about small town Nova Scotia, I was like, “That’s a weird genre of conversation,” and then I was like, “Oh my gosh, I absolutely do that at conferences.” You’re right.

Gretchen: You’ve done the academic version of that. It can be easy to exoticise this like, “Oh, this is a small town,” but you can also do this in the professional sense of like, “Oh, you worked at this place,” or like, “You studied at this place. Do you know this person who also works on this topic,” or “Do you know this person who” – and they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, they’re my advisor” or whatever.

Lauren: Yep. I have had that small talk at conferences many, many times.

Gretchen: It’s like, “Name a university and I’ll tell you if I know someone in their linguistics department.”

Lauren: I wanna return to this idea of questions and the kind of – because that is absolutely a go-to set of questions that I ask at conferences, and I feel like part of learning to navigate social interaction and learning to navigate this kind of small talk is having a little mental booklet of appropriate questions to ask in appropriate settings. That is totally a set of conference questions that I have.

Gretchen: In the academic context, asking somebody where they’re from – this tripped me up at my first few conferences – it’s not asking them where they grew up or even necessarily where they live, but it’s like, “What university are you at?” When I go to academic conferences now, people will say, “Where are you from,” and I know they’re trying to ask –

Lauren: Yeah, how do you deal with that now?

Gretchen: I know they’re trying to ask what university I’m at. So, I’ll say, “I’m actually not at a university.” I’m answering the assumption in that question even though it’s not overtly in the question. “But I live in Montreal, and I did my master’s at McGill” or something, so they can place me in their academic genealogy. It’s helpful to answer the hidden assumption in that question.

Lauren: I always find it incredibly awkward when you enter a small talk situation where someone’s set of go-to questions don’t quite match up with what you feel comfortable talking about. Sometimes, it’s because you might in an incredibly professional work setting and someone’s asking you questions about your family. It’s like, “Well, uh, how many kids I have is not really relevant to talking about linguistics, which is what we’re here for.” But sometimes it is a larger cultural thing around what is or isn’t appropriate to pull from your set of small talk questions.

Gretchen: There’s an often-cited distinction – and I expect this one may start breaking down when you start looking at smaller subcultures, like many things – but there’s an often-cited distinction between American versus French small talk conversations where Americans find it appropriate to say, “What do you do for work,” ask people about their jobs, even maybe ask people how much money they make, or what they’re paying for rent, or what they paid for a mortgage or a house –

Lauren: It’s funny. The first half of those I’m like, “Yeah, I would absolutely ask someone what they do for a job,” and then I would never feel comfortable asking someone how much money they earn.

Gretchen: I wouldn’t ask somebody how much they earn, but I remember being in my first few conversations, especially as a young adult starting out on my own, where people were swapping stories of how much they paid in rent for various places, and I found that so helpful, like how much you’re paying in rent there so you can kind of get an idea of what the rest of the market looked like in different places. That bit I’ve seen people keep doing.

Lauren: It’s funny how maybe if we were all more overt about how much we were paid, we could unionise through small talk.

Gretchen: Maybe we could! The comparison is that this is reputedly not socially acceptable in France where they tend to ask things like, “Where did you go on your last vacation,” or “What did you do on your last vacation,” which is not necessarily a small talk topic that I would bring up with somebody because maybe it’s presumptuous to assume they went or did something interesting for vacation.

Lauren: Interesting. That is definitely not in my set of go-to questions. How do you feel about the genre of “Do you have kids” or “Do you have pets”?

Gretchen: I mean, the thing is, I’m sure they’re very interesting for people who do have kids or pets, but because I don’t, it’s just a conversational dead end for me. I have to be like, “Do you wanna hear about my tomato plants? Because I know you’re trying to have small talk here, but like, no kids, no pets.” Or I have to adopt somebody else’s kids or pets and be like, “Oh, no, I don’t have kids, but my friend who has a kid who I was visiting just last week” – it doesn’t lead anywhere for me.

Lauren: I sometimes feel a bit the opposite where I know it’s a small talk question, and I should have a really pat answer, but I’m also living with a toddler hurricane, and I’m afraid that I will have too much information to share at someone. I think it’s this thing where, because this is ritualised small talk and we’re just doing it to build solidarity or pass time or establish some kind of common ground, for one person in the conversation, it’s not really an important question, they just pulled it out of their mental list of questions, and for the other person, it is an all-consuming part of their life. Like, there’re definitely points where I would not have asked you how the book is going.

Gretchen: I mean, I did get asked how the book was going pretty much constantly for five years while I was writing it, and when it was coming out, and so on. Some people were very apologetic about asking and be like, “Oh, I’m so sorry for asking, but the only small talk conversation I can think of to ask you is, ‘Dare I ask how the book is going,’” which was this interesting relationship. Especially academics would often act like that because in academia there’s this constant tension around “How’s the thesis going” or “How’s the dissertation?”

Lauren: I definitely – because it’s such a big project to write a PhD thesis, and people are often acutely stressed at various or many points throughout that process. Obviously, when I ask my own PhD students, it’s a very different question because they have to tell me what they’re up to. Basically, for anyone else, I don’t ask them until they bring it up, which is a meta information tracking happening in the list of small talk questions. It’s like, “Oh, well, now you’ve mentioned your dissertation, that means you must feel okay to” – or I’ll do a lot of that hedging like, “Uh, don’t tell me if it’s too stressful, but how’s the dissertation?” That’s very different to someone who just vaguely knows you’re writing a book or doing a thesis or something.

Gretchen: For me, it was interesting because there were definitely points in writing the book where I was stressed, but I didn’t find the questions stressful because if I was feeling stressed at the time, it wasn’t like I was thinking about anything else, so I might as well just tell you that I’m stressed. Or I might as well just tell you the like, “Oh, I’ve submitted this one draft, and I’m working on another draft now,” or something like that. I would generally have some sort of answer to that question because it was just so ubiquitous in terms of how it was taking over my life. I also thought, “Well, I want people to buy this book when it comes out, so if they’re gonna keep asking about it, that’s probably a good sign because that means they know I’m writing one.” So, I wasn’t as annoyed about it as maybe someone with a dissertation where they’re not trying to market it at the same time. I was like, “Well, if they’re asking about my book, maybe they’ll wanna read it – maybe they’ll wanna buy it.”

Lauren: I like your understanding of what’s happening in the small talk dynamic there. I mean, I think part of what happens when you think you’re just asking a like, “How’s the book” or “How’s the kid,” and then you get this response where someone’s like, “We were up all night. They didn’t sleep. They’re teething. Ahh,” and you’re like, “Oh, o-okay. I don’t know what to do here,” I think part of the tension here is going back to the idea of phatics that we talked about in that earlier episode where phatics are very much not about information. They’re just a little dance that you do with each other to be polite. I think the problem is when you sometimes ask a question, and you’re asking it in a much more phatic kind of like, “How’s the weather,” “How’s your kids,” just like, “All good.”

Gretchen: Yeah. And there’s a sense of “How’s your X,” where “X” is something they mentioned last time or something you know about them – you know, “How’s the job going?” You don’t really necessarily expect to hear, “Oh, everything is terrible, and I’m planning on quitting.” You know you might hear it, but you kind of want to hear, “Oh, I’m working on this now,” or something like that. It’s a way of trying to ask for a little bit more information. Yet, on the receiving end, that question still feels very personal.

Lauren: Yeah, so one person’s treating it far more like a phatic interaction, and the other one’s treating it as a much less phatic conversation topic.

Gretchen: It’s interesting because I feel like this is one of the areas of language that you learn how to do comparatively late in your development as a child and adolescent and so on. I remember when I was a later teenager at holidays, summer breaks, family reunions, seeing family that you maybe see a couple times a year, and it was really helpful for me that my mom would coach me into saying, you know, “You’re gonna be seeing a bunch of relatives over the next week. They’re gonna ask you how school’s going. It would be good if you think of a two to three sentence answer that you can give them that tells them something you’re okay with them knowing and lets you have a satisfying interaction there.” So, you can be like, “Oh, I’m in Grade 11 now, and we’re working on this thing, and it’s interesting for me.” She would coach me to think about that in advance and be like, “You can give the same answer to all of the relatives.”

Lauren: Oh my gosh, your mom should’ve been a discourse analyst.

Gretchen: I really think she had a missed calling here. That was really helpful for me because I feel like this is my first media training because every single interview I did about the book someone always says, “Why did you write this book?” and you have to have an answer to that, and you have to not be annoyed that you’re giving the same answer to that. The same thing is like every single time you see a relative that you haven’t seen for a year or two, they’re gonna say, “How’s the whatever going,” whether that’s, “How’s school,” or “How’s your job,” or “How’s the city you’re living in.” They’re trying to remember a noun that vaguely applies to you.

Lauren: I love the experience with relatives in particular that you see once every year or so, or old family friends, because they’ll be like, “How’s the basketball going?” and you’re like, “I have not played basketball for five years, and I was very bad at it at the time.” I think it’s so much easier to come from a place of “They’re just trying to have this social engagement with me” rather than a point of irritation.

Gretchen: It’s so easy to get irritated. And yet, what the person’s trying to do is express interest in your life, and if they say, “How’s basketball going?” – or for me it was like, “How’s debate going?” which was a really good question for a while, and then I stopped doing it and can say, “Oh, actually I’m doing that much anymore. What I am doing is this.” Because they don’t know that they should be asking you about your new hobby, but you can just segue into the new hobby.

Lauren: It’s not that they want a factual report based on their question. It’s not a legal interrogation.

Gretchen: Right. And thinking about the meta-question behind the question was also what let me figure out how to finally give a satisfying answer to the ubiquitous question, “So, you’re a linguist. How many languages do you know?”

Lauren: This is definitely one of those things where if you aren’t a linguist, it seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If you are – it’s that asymmetry in how frequently you have to have this conversation, right, where you might not talk to many linguists, and so you want to ask them questions like this. As the person on the receiving end of it, you are constantly asked, “How’s your thesis,” “How many languages do you speak,” and it can be very – for a long time my immediate reaction to that question was frustration, but as you say, understanding the real question there is just “What do you do?”

Gretchen: So, if you happen to mention your cat, a natural thing for someone to do in conversation is be like, “Oh, how many cats do you have?” The person on the other end doesn’t care how many cats you actually have. They don’t care if you have one cat, or two cats, or three cats. The next thing they’re gonna ask is like, “How old are they? What are their names?” They’re gonna lead into the like, “Oh, let’s get the person to talk about their cats.” Or same thing with kids, the person doesn’t care how many kids you have. They’re just trying to make conversation.

The thing that they think about when they hear “linguist” is language, so they’re like, “I dunno, let’s just put a question in front of ‘language.’” The thing that I did for a while is I would go into, in great detail, all of the languages that I had vaguely learned a little bit of because I was excited about this. I would have all these caveats around, “Well, I don’t really” – you know, you don’t really speak Latin, but it’s interesting because you learn how to translate it and to read it. And “Do we even know what it means to know a language? To what extent do I blah blah blah?”

Nobody was satisfied with this interaction. I knew it wasn’t working for me because it was this very and long and detailed answer and didn’t give the other person space to keep asking me questions or to answer some of their own questions. The answer was too long. If it felt complete to me, it also felt intimidating. People would be like, “Wow! That’s a ton of languages.” And I’d be like, “Yes, but I don’t actually speak any of them very well.”

What I learned to do instead was just pick one language that I feel like talking about right now and that this person would probably be somewhat interested in it and just answer with that one language and with a bit of a story to it. So, if somebody says, “How many languages do you know,” and I say, “It’s really interesting living in Montreal because there’s so much French, and I speak French,” and that gives them the space to ask questions about Montreal or to say, “Oh, I visited Montreal once. It was very nice.”

Then we’re having a conversation where there’s a bit more back and forth, there’s a bit of questions and answer, the person can say something, or “Oh, I’ve always wanted to visit Montreal” or whatever, or they can talk about their speaking or non-speaking of French, and it doesn’t lead me into this exhaustive laundry list that nobody’s really happy about. It leaves open in later conversation if they mention Spanish or something, you can be like, “Oh, I speak a bit of Spanish, too.” You’re not lying, but you’re seeing the question for the purpose behind it and answering that purpose rather than getting hung up on the specific details of the wording of that question because the “How many” isn’t actually the part they’re interested in, it’s the, “You’re a linguist; you must like languages. Tell me something about language.”

Lauren: What I really appreciate is that you have used your linguist powers to do some analysis of what’s happening in the conversations that you’re having to more effectively do small talk. I think that’s a really great example of applying linguistics that we don’t often give people credit for.

Gretchen: I mean, this is one of the holy grails of linguistics in my mind is to understand that meta-question or understand what’s going on. I think of it in terms of Gricean Maxims in terms of pragmatics, which is another thing we’ve also done an episode about – this is the call back episode – which is the idea that anything that you say in a conversation, the other person will interpret as relevant to the conversation, and they’ll seek ways to construe it as relevant to what’s being said. If they say, “How many languages,” and you reply naming one thing about one language, that’s enough for that to be relevant to the conversation for the conversation to keep going, even though you don’t have to do exact literal responses to everything because sometimes what people are asking is actually a different thing at a meta-level.

Lauren: I think about small talk a lot from the perspective of something I find really interesting which is tracking knowledge state, so what the other person knows and what they might want to know. It’s basically coming to the same conclusion as you, just with my own particular interest in what language tries to achieve in conversations. Kind of going, “Well, the only reason they’re asking me about this thing that I am bored to death of talking about is because they haven’t heard about it yet.” I’m finding that as a way to feel more at peace. Especially years and years of doing retail, I found just being very zen about like, “This may be the umpteenth time I’ve done this this week, but this person doesn’t know about this thing.”

Gretchen: “Where are the bathrooms?” “Look, I can just tell you. I’ve said this so many times today, but it’s fine.”

Lauren: Using linguistics to make small talk more pleasant for you and the people that you are talking to, which may be useful if you happen to be listening to this in an impending holiday season, or if you’re starting a new job, or if you’re at a conference. Having some ways to navigate small talk are useful in so many ways.

Gretchen: I also think it’s useful in contexts where even answering a question like, “How are you,” feels awkward because you’re going through a hard time, and you don’t feel like it’s honest to say, “Oh, I’m good,” but you don’t necessarily wanna share or acquaintances don’t necessarily wanna hear the whole story about how terrible things have been. This post on Tumblr, which we’ll link to, gives the advice to say any at least mildly interesting fact about something you experienced relatively recently in the last few days. Like, “My cat got stuck in a cereal box today,” “Here’s something that’s on my mind,” or like, “I got a package in the mail,” or something like this. People will interpret it as a valid answer to “How are you?” People will take that at face value, and they’ll take that as the non-answer that it is where you don’t necessarily wanna declare that the whole world is fine because sometimes it feels like the whole world is on fire, or your corner of the world is on fire, but you don’t necessarily wanna have that fire conversation.

Lauren: Absolutely – we say at the end of 2020.

Gretchen: [Laughs]

Lauren: Use the power of conversational relevance to divert – yeah, and I think knowing that it’s okay to steer the small talk boat and that is still meeting the aim of the small talk is a good thing to know.

Gretchen: To go back to talking about, “Here are all the terrible things I’ve experienced in my life,” doing the like, “Oh my god, the news is so terrible, and I can’t believe how terrible it is,” sometimes you have that back and forth of like, “Ugh, it’s so terrible,” “Yes, it’s terrible.”

Lauren: That’s the Nepali-style solidarity building through suffering.

Gretchen: It does build solidarity. I think that gets us into this question of, “How can we use our knowledge of small talk and the agendas of small talk, the meta-questions or the knowledge states that people exist in, to make small talk feel good for what you’re trying to feel at the moment, “ whether that’s to build solidarity or whether that’s to distract you from what’s going on in the world. What can you do to shift the direction of a particular small talk thing?

Lauren: Alongside that, I think looking at your list of questions that you potentially have to also steer the conversation – I have occasionally had those super awkward moments with a group of work colleagues where no one has had a question that’s allowed people to open up in a way that feels appropriate for that space. And then someone has asked a question that’s worked really well or said something that’s like – I file that away. I’m like, “Ah, asking if anyone’s tried any new recipes lately worked really well in this work context.” It might flunk in another work context, but that’s now in my brain as an option to keep things going. I think open questions really help people to take it and run in a direction that they feel comfortable with. As someone who was asked for far too many years after they graduated if they were a PhD student in a work context, it’s just safer to ask open questions or just inflate someone. It’s like, “Are you a lecturer?” But even then, that can backfire.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, everyone loves being asked if they’re a prof.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that I have that I use a lot in conference settings are, “How’s your conference going?” because this works for pretty much everybody. You can ask the same person this question multiple times on different days.

Lauren: It doesn’t matter if they’re a PhD student who’s here to just be an audience member or if they’re a prof giving a plenary.

Gretchen: It works in non-academic contexts, which is a lot of my conferences now. Another one that I have which is kind of a holdover from my time in academic conferences is, “What are you working on,” because this seems to be a common question in academia. But in non-academic settings, I like it too because it leaves open the question of, you know, this could be a side project, this could be a hobby, this could be a thing you’re doing at your job. It leaves that a little bit more open than, “What do you do for work?” Another conference that I was at recently, we were doing a virtual networking event and sitting around a virtual table, and somebody said, “What’s something you’ve worked on recently that you’re proud of?” And I was like, “Oh, this is a really neat way to get to know people at this table” because it gets everybody the opportunity to be like, “Oh, I wrote this article for this place” or like, “Oh, I did this thing,” and gets people the opportunity to share their work and share something about them. I like that one. I’m gonna use that again.

Lauren: I’m gonna add that to my list, too.

Gretchen: The other piece of hacking small talk tips that I learned when I was maybe about 13 – I think I was a young teenager. I remember being in my childhood bedroom when I read this book, and it was one of those self-help books. I took one sentence out of it, but it’s been a very useful one sentence, which is about all you can demand out of a self-help book.

Lauren: What’s this sentence? I wanna know. I can’t believe you left this until the end. This is one of those bad self-improvement life hacking podcasts all of a sudden.

Gretchen: “Please listen to us for half an hour to get the one golden sentence.” Maybe this is more obvious to people who weren’t 13 at the time and had been to more networking events, which I had not done very much when I was 13, admittedly. This was the notion of the occasion/location statement.

Lauren: Okay. Can you unpack that for me?

Gretchen: Yes, exactly. I will write you a whole little self-help book. When you’re in an environment with strangers or acquaintances – people you’re trying to strike up a conversation with – one thing that you can do that is not weird is you can look around and make some sort of remark about either the occasion – the event that you’re at – or the location – something in the environment.

One example of this would be you’re at a party, you don’t really know very many people, so you go hang out by the refreshment table, and you start striking up a conversation with somebody about the cheese like, “Oh, this cheese looks really good,” and then you segue from that into, “Yes, this party’s been so much fun blah blah blah.” Or if you’re at someone’s birthday party, you can be like, “So, how do you know the host,” or the cliché – I’ve never done this – but at a bar or something, you go up to someone, and you’re like, “So, do you come here often?” Or if you’re trying to strike up a conversation with somebody at the post office, you can be like, “Wow! This line’s taking a long time” because we’re both standing in it or something like that. It’s this thing that you have in common in the environment either based on the time or the space. That was how I first started thinking about small talk.

Although, these days, it also segues into doing events where you hang out in virtual space. I’ve been experimenting a lot with doing proximity-based chats where you have, here’s this virtual platform which lets you have conversations with more fluid groups of people rather than just being on a massive video call where only one or two people can talk at once. The thing that’s interesting about them is, on the one hand, there’s this built-in conversational topic which is, here’s this new platform we’re trying out, but on the other hand, that’s like being like, “Oh, look at this cheese tray,” or “Look at this chandelier.”

Eventually, you wanna move on from that into another type of conversation that’s something you can have with not just anybody. You know, encouraging people to do introductions or introduce themselves in the chat or introduce themselves with each other or designating certain conversational topics or certain zones. I’ve realised that one of the functions of a conference when it comes to making conversation with people is that it gives you a different set of built-in conversational small talk topics that are different from what you have in ordinary life. You can say, “Oh, have you been to any talks that you really liked,” and then you can start talking about what happened in the talks. That gives you an entry into a different type of conversational topic than you might have with somebody that you run into in line at the post office even though, hypothetically, that person might be able to have that conversation, but you don’t have the shared knowledge that you could enter into it together.

Lauren: A small talk experience can just be that moment of small talk, and you have a nice chance to interact with each other. Or it can be that segue into a much deeper domain-specific or, you know, content-specific for linguistics, or feeling-specific if you’re with your friends and/or family. But it’s such an interesting genre to pull apart in and of itself.

Gretchen: It’s really interesting to think, okay, what do we have that’s that bridge between your phatic expressions, which are really rote, and your, you know, “Oh, we’re having this conversation that neither of us has ever had before, and we’re arriving at all these interesting insights.” You just don’t always end up there, and that’s okay. It can be much lower effort to do a conversation where one or both of you has had this conversation before, and you’re just having it with each other instead of with somebody else. It’s a genre that’s interesting to analyse and to figure out how to make satisfying for yourself as its own thing.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get you podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet – now in paperback.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as @Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to 46 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom where they can talk to other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include honorifics, a behind-the-scenes on writing Crash Course Linguistics and an AMA with lexicographer Emily Brewster. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their lives.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #transcripts #episode 51 #small talk #conversations #conversation #pragmatics

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biometricbits · 5 years

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Digital aspirations and paper pages : Why analog media continues to thrive in a digital world.

Painting is one of the most archaic ways to create an image. In a world dominated by digital imagery, which can be easily and endlessly reproduced, there remains a demand for the irreproducible. When thinking about what humans want, the easiest place to begin would be to look at our senses, and their importance in shaping our perception of the world. The term “analog” and “digital” can be interpreted in a number of ways, and the digital/analog split goes back much farther than most initially think.

Portrait of Akhenaten's daughters Max Headroom

We like our senses. Why do some people still want to play a record when they can play an mp3? The reason is one based on a human desire to touch and feel things. Most of us still see things with our eyes, touch things with our hands, and hear things with our ears.

What are the differences between analog and digital? :

The roots of the word analog comes from greek “ana” which means parallel/copy of , and “logos” which means reality. In this regard one could argue that analog means media which is more equivalent to reality. It runs in parallel to reality itself. Whereas the “digital” is a quantized version of this reality. It’s more binary in nature.

Ralph Gerard, who explored this dichotomy in 1951, said that “an analogical system is one in which one of two variables is continuous on the other, while in a digital system the variable is discontinuous and quantized” (qtd. in Wilder 243). It is from Gerard that we get the prototypical analog device, the slide rule—it’s continuous numbering, as well as meaningful spatiality, wherein the further down the number is, the larger it is—and the abacus as the prototypical digital device, due to the ‘on-or-off-ness’ of the beads, where they are either counted or not. This latter conception of digitality has principally to do with the language of binary, used by today’s digital devices, in its utilization of 1s and 0s.

Electronic Music Composer Suzanne Ciani Screenshot of Logic Pro synth emulator

We are the robots:

Our bodies are increasingly subject to more regulation from technological advancements. From stints put into our hearts to keep the blood pumping, to glasses which help many to see the world in focus. There is little doubt that our bodies are being integrated with technology at a rapid pace, and it would be hard to argue that advancements in science are a detriment in any way. However, one aspect of becoming a cyborg doesn’t involve upgrades to the physical “hardware” so to speak (our flesh, guts and bones) but rather to the creation of what is termed the “digital self”. This is the idea that digital technologies have an enormous impact on our notion of what the self is. The digital has a tendency to be more inward focused. Meaning that it is becoming more difficult to understand what’s going on inside of them without some sort of specialized knowledge. We can understand that a diamond tip on a record player stylus fits into a groove on a piece of vinyl that correspond to vibrations made during a recording, and that this same sound can be reproduced through the use of speakers. Now, if we compare this to playing a song on spotify, on our phone, through bluetooth speakers we get a very different interaction with the song itself because there is no record we can hold in our hands, there is no needle which scrapes along the surface of a circular piece of vinyl, it’s all in the air, like magic. Even when the song is over, the data is being gathered by spotify about how long we listened to the song, whether we liked it or not, and then that algorithm tries to find other music that we like so we continue to listen. Can you imagine telling someone in the 1970s that in the future a small device you carried around in your pocket would not only play music through speakers without wires, but could actually recommend over artists you’d like? It would be the stuff of science fiction, but here we are today.

The result of these specialized looks by artificial intelligence and computers has caused people to become more inward looking, and more focused on their own thoughts and feelings. Shanyang Zhao studies the online communications of teenagers, and he saw this manifested in the creation in what he termed the digital self “The digital self is . . . more oriented toward one’s inner world, focusing on thoughts, feelings and personalities rather than one’s outer world, focusing on height, weight, and looks” (396)

Marshall McLuhan and Mass Media as a narcotic agent:

“Electric media is an extension of ourselves, a communal act...an electronic world re-tribalizes men.”

“A point of view means a static fixed position, and you can’t have a point of view in the electric age. It’s impossible to have a point of view in the electric age, and have any meaning at all. You’ve got to be everywhere at once, whether you like it or not, you’ve got to be participating in everything at the same time, and that is not a point of view”

It is often stated that McLuhan predicted the internet, and it’s hard not to see the parallels popping up everywhere on facebook, instagram and snapchat. Jaron Lanier was at the forefront of a lot of the tech boom in the 80s and 90s, and is said to have come up with the term virtual reality. He’s a fierce opponent to social media, and has said that “This is just like those other examples in the past where you have a mass addiction with a commercial interest behind it. The difference, in this case, is that the side effect is to disconnect humanity from reality.”

Portraiture in the age of Deep Fakes, Digital Photos and Polaroids:

The advent of digital photography allowed everyone to document their life endlessly. One only need an internet connection and there isn’t even any need for an increase of the physical memory needed to even store the photos. They can be uploaded directly to the cloud. In this regard the medium itself is never touched. There is no film that needs to be developed. This has changed both the way that photographs are taken, and the importance of the event at which the photo is taken, but also in the way they shape ones experience with the world. Bernard Stiegler addresses how these changes take place in his essay “The Discrete Image.” Stiegler argues that with analog there was a certain faith that people had when looking at it, that the events there actually happened. In the digital age this faith is completely eroded and people look at every photo skeptically as to whether or not what is present is actually real (“Discrete Image” 150)

Paint as a Slow Media:

One reason why artists are still attracted to these older mediums may have something to do with the speed that it takes to make with them and how that effects the creative process. For instance, with digital painting a mark can immediately be “undone” by hitting Ctrl-Z. The options are endless, whereas with oil paint you not only get a few chances to make a mark on part of a canvas and then you’ve also got to wait at least a day for it to dry before you can paint on top of it. Similarly with film, a photographer may spend more time focusing on compositional elements because he only knows he’s got a limited amount of film. This changes the interaction with the subjects being photographed and results in different photos.

Hand vs No hand: Computer graphics are currently helped along with a great deal of digital “helpers” that can create textures and special effects that can dress up a digital drawing and make it into a lion.

Ownership of analog and digital media:

One of the qualities often associated with digital media is the ease with which it can be reproduced, and companies like spotify, itunes, netflix, etc. all do everything in their power to link your usage of a digital file expressly through their sites. You don’t ever really own a film that you watch on netflix, rather you have the right to stream it through a subscription service. This has changed the way that music is shared. One of the more beloved aspects of a “mix tape” was the fact that you could give it to someone, and they in turn could give it to someone. It was a physical object that held the contents of the music within it. With paintings, prints can be made of a particular piece, but someone must buy the original in order to own it at its highest quality. This connects painting to these other analog mediums. The focus is on the original, not a reproduction of it. This is one thing which still leads to paintings having some sort of value. Collectors want to buy the object that sat in an artist’s studio, not some poster of it.

How artists have reacted to digital media:

Artists have often employed the use of plans and mathematical formulations in the creation of their work. The show at the Whitney entitled "Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018" explored these ideas.

Sine Man

Gnarly Dakimakura AI generated body pillow

Sol Lewitt

Rafaël Rozendaal, Abstract Browsing

Manfred Mohr: Band Structures

Margo Wolowiec: Still Water Circling Palms

Zdeněk Sýkora

#research

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