\n<\/p>\n
Hi there, how\u2019re you? How\u2019s it going? You alright? All good?<\/p>\n
As any Briton knows, none of these questions is an inquiry into your emotional state, the material conditions of your life or your opinion on anything. Respond positively \u2013 \u201call good so far, touch wood\u201d is nice \u2013 then move on to the purpose of the interaction: \u201cI\u2019m returning an Amazon package?\u201d<\/p>\n
I communicate for a living and am nearly always in front of a camera, microphone, keyboard or live audience. Great conversation is a supreme design to me, an exquisite dance of mutual pleasure practised by true proficients who make it seem effortless. And then there\u2019s small talk, the Primark version for everyday wear. That\u2019s all the chat around the edges, the bits of make-do and banter. Busy day so far? What\u2019s the traffic like?<\/p>\n
But make no mistake \u2013 this kind of conversation isn\u2019t superfluous, it\u2019s vital. In fact, the work day doesn\u2019t flow without small talk. It\u2019s team building, not forced conversation, and it should occur simultaneously with a necessary interaction, transaction or service, to ease the movement like linguistic synovial fluid.<\/p>\n
Recent research backs me up. Across three countries (Singapore, the US and France) and 1,800 people, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reported that people find value in everyday conversations they\u2019d anticipated as being boring. So small talk is a social good with a bad reputation. We dread it, but it benefits us.<\/p>\n
Small talk is not an invitation to engage in deep conversation, theoretical debate or soul exchange, but a hedge against them. It is supposed to be rote GCSE-level role play about universal topics on which everyone has the same opinion, by which I mean the weather, not death. You are meant to recycle phrases that are not interesting, without introducing novel information.<\/p>\n
Through small talk, this week I learned that a recent football match was like watching kids in a playground (ie both amateurish and boring), that April weather is so variable you\u2019re never sure what coat to wear, and that now the clocks have gone forward the evenings are noticeably brighter. Through small talk, you can be polite to the dry cleaner for one minute, three times a year, for decades, saying the same thing over and over, and you can both earn a reputation as pillars of the community, however true or not that might be.<\/p>\n
I mean, don\u2019t force your inane babble on the unimpressed staff at the 24-hour shop, like some sad woman whose eventual departure is trailed by pitying looks and the shop workers saying: \u201cPoor thing. She must be lonely.\u201d Be brief, sincere and bland. Don\u2019t ask weird questions. I was once asked by a serial-killery waiter what exactly I planned to do for the rest of the day. And I was once trapped on a night bus in a traffic jam in the rain, having some doleful chat with the woman next to me when she said, with intent: \u201cIt\u2019s a bit grim, isn\u2019t it? A bit like my year.\u201d I did not take the bait. I was also asked by a very intense girl at a gallery cafe which painting I liked best in the exhibition, and why. I froze, then whispered: \u201cI like all paintings equally.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you avoid these pitfalls, you\u2019ll do fine. Small talk isn\u2019t boring; it\u2019s a necessary staple. It\u2019s not meaningless blather; it\u2019s essential reinforcement with deeply embedded cultural meaning. It\u2019s a bulwark against total social breakdown. The one thing that human beings do that distinguishes us from other mammals is use language to communicate, express ourselves and understand others. Has evolution done a U-turn? Just take one look down the length of a train carriage, crammed with inert, slack-faced blobs staring at their phones, seemingly unaware of each other\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n
How have we got a society \u2013 it\u2019s not just young people, I\u2019ve seen it in all generations \u2013 in which we no longer know how to talk to each other with decency, self-awareness and consideration? Through small talk, we patch and mend a world, word by word, that hasn\u2019t been completely ripped apart by rage, paranoid mistrust, fear and loathing or numb resignation. That is what I\u2019m getting at when I ask if you\u2019ve had a chance to get out of the office and enjoy the sunshine at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi there, how\u2019re you? How\u2019s it going? You alright? All good? As any Briton knows, none of these questions is an inquiry into your emotional state, the material conditions of your life or your opinion on anything. Respond positively \u2013 \u201call good so far, touch wood\u201d is nice \u2013 then move on to the purpose<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[24284,1326,12026,11183,1664,14190,7359,98,213,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-48545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-bidisha","9":"tag-dont","10":"tag-knock","11":"tag-mend","12":"tag-power","13":"tag-rage","14":"tag-ripped","15":"tag-small","16":"tag-talk","17":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}