July 7, 2006
View Comments | Post CommentSay What You Mean
I'm currently on vacation to the beach in St. Augustine, along with Jeanette, Betty, and their family. I experienced an interesting moment on the plane that highlighted how far we've come as a society from saying what we mean and being efficient communicators. It's an indulgence created by wealth and security, every bit as much as other indulgences. It's only in a society with plenty of leisure time that memes could develop that have conditioned people to ask questions with no intention that the person asked provide an answer. Or where people can have entire conversations of meaningless flapjaw, saying nothing either cares about whatsoever. There has developed a whole parliamentary procedure associated with everday life, but its rules are written nowhere, and behaving intuitively and logically automatically makes one adverse to those rules. And so it is in such a society that the following could occur.
I was in the window seat, row 12, seat "F," on the right side of an AirTran red-eye from San Francisco to Atlanta. The middle and aisle seats were occupied by a young couple. When the flight arrived at the gate, there was the usual commotion of people rising from their seats, crowding the aisle, retrieving their bags, and so on, well before most of them would actually be able to get out. But eventually, the line at the front began moving, and the people in front of us cleared out. It was time for my row to go.
But the people in the seats to my left didn't go anywhere. They just sat there, watching as the line began moving from behind us, and the people seated to our rear began exiting the plane. I didn't know why they were doing that, and I was excited to get off the plane and see Jeanette, so I politely asked them, "Excuse me, are you two going to get off?"
One of them said casually, "Oh. Well, our bag is in an overhead bin about three rows back, so we figured that, rather than try to navigate the line of people leaving, we'd just wait until the end. Why, are we holding you up?"
And I said, entirely casually and without any annoyance or sarcasm, "Well, yes. You are holding me up. But I guess that's okay. I don't mind waiting."
And then they said, much to my surprise, "Jesus Christ, fine. We'll get up. God. You don't have to be so rude about it." And they got up and grabbed their bag and left in a huff.
Let's review. They asked me whether they were holding me up, and I answered yes, because I literally would be leaving were it not for their continued occupancy of the seats between me and the exit. And they thought I was being a huge asshole, just because as a society, a tacit agreement exists where people lie and supplicate to others rather than cause any sort of conflict, however mild.
But I intended no conflict. I was fine with waiting it out with them so they could retrieve their bag with less hassle. I made no indication that I wasn't fine with it. I just answered their question. That's it.
Rule: Don't ask something if you don't want it answered.
Corollary: Don't hesitate to ask something if you do want it answered.
Axiom: The more broad lesson here, like I've said before, is that one should, to the best of one's ability and within some degree of creative license, always say what one means. Doing otherwise is a waste of everyone's time.
Posted at July 7, 2006 11:05 AM | Comments (7)
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i hear what you are saying, but i really don't think it has anything to do with an affluent society. in many many cultures around the world with far fewer resources than our own (bali and rwanda come to mind), there is a highly ornate system of perfunctory sayings, sometimes lasting minutes, which ones is obliged to say upon meeting someone, in sympathy, at meals, or really in many daily social interactions. in many places, particularly ones with the potential for great tension because of ethnically or religiously diverse or particularly dense population, such social rituals are extremely important social glue. the fact that you feel you should be able to say whatever you want is a greater indicator of the wealth and leisure of uppperclass american society than the social conventions you chafe against.
Posted by: toadie at July 8, 2006 11:48 AM
Well shit, why didnt you just say you had an encounter with some assholes on a plane?
Also I think toadie (is that you Dan? It might be Dan, Ive been blasting toadies from my room recently....although dan doesnt have internet right now) makes a good point in that feeling that we can freely and bluntly speak our minds is more of a result of feeling secure in our affluent society.
Posted by: Chris Santoro at July 8, 2006 2:57 PM
I have no idea about cultural differences (my entire knowledge about how other cultures say something other than what they mean comes from that book Dave Barry wrote about visiting Japan), but it needn't even be that macro. I have observed major communicational differences between families. It seems to be about what one grows up with.
I present to you the contrast between my fiancee and myself. She grew up in a family where nobody said what they meant, especially if they were upset. As a result, she has developed a skill at reading between the lines of every single statement. The Stark family, on the other hand, pretty much says what it means. As a result, I've never been that great at subtext, though I'm improving. It's taken years of conversations where Christy is trying to figure out what I'm really saying before she realized....I'm really saying WHAT I'M SAYING!
Like everything else, it's a matter of degree. I'm far less blunt than Barzelay, but I'm usually about as subtle as Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.
Speaking of saying what I mean - David, you should have received my wedding invitation by now. I wouldn't have sent it if I didn't really hope to see you there.
Posted by: Ben at July 8, 2006 7:25 PM
When I was referring to our leisure-capable society, I didn't really mean America. I meant our modern world, as opposed to, say, ancient hunter-gatherers who spent nearly all of their waking days procuring food. It's a bit of a disconnect in modern man: we have progressed to the point that inefficiency is a value, because it distracts us from the boredom of our otherwise mundane existence.
Ben, I'm not sure yet about the wedding. Buuuuut...
You bring up an interesting point about communication. Presumably, her style of communicating works well within her own family, and yours within your family. That somewhat undermines my theory about communication, which is that dancing around things is necessarily inefficient. I think perhaps a more generally applicable statement would be that one should always say what one means in such a way that the person to whom one is communicating will understand it--or at least understand as much of it as one intends.
Since Christy's method works for her family, there is nothing wrong with that kind of communication within her family. But she errs when trying to communicate the same way with you (and you in turn probably transgress the same way when failing to include what she sees as the necessary subtext).
If that's true, then I'm in the wrong here. Society says meaningless polite things and niceties that avoid confrontation. In refusing to participate in that process, I'm the one who isn't being a sufficiently expressive communicator.
Posted by: David Barzelay at July 8, 2006 9:46 PM
What if the people were just trying to creep you out? Maybe they had a bet going to see who could freak out at a stranger in the most believable way, and that woman won. Maybe earlier they ordered a no-foam latte from the Starbucks kiosk in the airport and when it came back with foam they thew it on the floor and burst into tears. Maybe I give them too much credit.
BTW - I forgot to to reply a few days ago but yes, I want to hear the Trotsky song. Can I have it please?
Posted by: Claire at July 9, 2006 12:10 AM
No, Claire. Not a Trotsky song. A Trotsky album.
Posted by: David Barzelay at July 11, 2006 8:22 PM
Y'know, David, you may be right that it's best to communicate in a way to get your message across.....but I still have to agree with your original post in this point: Wouldn't things be a lot easier if everybody DID say what they meant? More information would certainly get across.
Posted by: Ben at July 15, 2006 12:38 AM
