Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barriers it creates between people.
—Laurie Helgo, psychologist and author
How’s everything?” Now there’s a greeting that is impossible to respond to with an honest answer. I hear it in the office daily. And the receptionist at the hotel I’m staying at today told me that it’s part of her greeting repertoire. If you know how everything is, then you may also be on the run from every intelligence agency and AI project on earth. You will be hunted down for your brain. But the truth is, we don’t know how everything is, so the next time you get asked this and you want to connect, not deflect, respond with an honest answer: “I can’t answer that. I don’t know how everything is but I am enjoying this meatball sub, thanks.” You may also respond to the word-trash question with a word-trash answer and say: “This meatball sub is everything.” No, it’s not. It’s a meatball sub. Either our worldview of everything is narrowing—to the width of a sandwich—or we’re lying (or both). In the New York Times, Jody Rosen wrote, Everything is “a clever ploy, a word vague enough to appeal to all comers and too forceful for many to ignore.”
Everything is an example of the vague language George Orwell warned us about in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.” It’s a marker of the overstatement generation. Why does it matter? Because it’s disconnecting us!
How are you? is another filler of small talk that’s often said—especially during cold calls—without sincerity. And the person on the receiving end knows it’s phony. If we are using this question to attempt to forge a connection with a family member, friend, or lover, it may not be insincere, but there are better ways to connect. Adding a today, this afternoon, or right now to the end of the question makes it more specific, easier to connect with and respond to. But it’s still an abstract, vague question. Which parts of me do I include in my answer? My foot is pain-free today, but I feel tired. I’m feeling down about not asking for the phone number of this girl I met last night.
There’s so much to how a person is that it makes How are you? an impossible question to answer. Instead, ask about a specific part of a person’s life: “How was your date with Sally on Friday?” “How did you sleep last night?” “How warm was it in Miami last weekend?” Better still, drop the vague how, and ask a question that is easy to answer with specifics. Start your question with a what, not a how: “What did you guys have for dinner last night?” “What did the sauce taste like?” “What did you have for dessert?” Each answer will offer up more specific words—if she answers Key lime pie, you can ask them if she’s ever been to Key West. “When did she go there? Who did they go there with?” And before you know it, you’re both connected and deep into a story about gate crashing a party at Ernest Hemingway’s house and waking up on a stranger’s yacht off the coast of Cuba.
Black-and-white movies, and our grandparents, would often lead us to believe that people were more polite in the good old days. That may be so, but it’s not reflected by the usage frequency of Excuse me or Apologies. Google’s Ngram Viewer1—which you can try with any word(s) you like—shows that in Google’s corpus of nonfiction and fiction books, the words apologies and excuse me represent an increasing percentage of all word use—the frequency of excuse me almost doubled between 2007 and 2008 alone. Of course, these stats would be more meaningful if they also included our conversations (I keep calling the NSA, but they aren’t answering), but the written word does represent our speech, and the best writers are the writers whose voice you “hear” when you read them.
So, in the absence of NSA tapes and Amazon Alexa transcripts, Google Ngram can give us a general reflection of usage (verbal and written) of a word at any point in written history up until 2008. And what Ngram tells us is that ever since an all-time low in 1973, the usage of Excuse me has been rising.
I go to Whole Foods an inefficient number of times a week. I also work on an office floor where there are about 200 other people. Whether it’s while I fondle organic lemons in the produce aisle or fill my cup at the water cooler, I dislike the phrase Excuse me. In England, I’d call it a pet hate. In the USA, a pet peeve or a bugbear. In Australia, I’d say it’s bloody annoying. But the truth is it makes my body react in the same way as someone scratching his nails down a chalkboard or brushing his teeth in front of me.
I prefer Excuse me, please, as it’s more of a request than a command. Because when a yoga-pants-wearing frowner says to me, Excuse me, as I’m trying to decide which citrus has the best attributes for juicing, I feel as if she’s really saying, Move, bitch. Get out the way. Or more accurately: Get the f*ck out of my way, sh*thead. At least, that’s how I take it. Because, often, there is no “way” to get out of: I’ve looked at the distance between myself and the other person, only to see that there is enough space for two more people between us. So, rather than say Excuse me, how about you move around me? Given a choice between walking into me and not, I’m assuming you will take the latter. Excuse me—at least in New York—is the pedestrian equivalent of the Indian rickshaw’s I’m-coming-and-I’m-near-you warning toot. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the noise of rickshaw tooting, and on the first day I rented a car during my year in India, I adopted the I’m-coming-everyone tooting approach to driving. If you have ever driven or been a passenger in India, you know it’s a necessity. But I feel the Whole Foods/sidewalk/office Excuse me equivalent of it is not. Is it because I’m British? It’s possible.
Lynne Murphy, an (American) professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex (in the UK), writes in her book The Prodigal Tongue: “Excuse me creates its own diplomatic crises. Americans can use it to mean either ‘Excuse me for what I’ve just done’ or ‘Will you excuse me for what I’m about to do?’ Brits tend to use it only for the latter meaning, and so when Americans push past them with a late excuse me, it is seen as the worst type of forwardness.”
I imagine some of my American readers will disagree with me on my suggestion to add the please to Excuse me. Murphy says that what please means to you depends on whether you are British (like me) or American: “Americans add please to requests about half as much as Britons do—not because they’re less polite, but often because they’re trying to be polite. Adding please to something that’s already a request doubly marks it as a request: Could you move? is already a request with the softening ‘could you’ formulation (rather than an unsoftened, Move!). Since it’s already softened and clearly a request, the please seems redundant. Americans thus often interpret Could you move, please? as a marker of urgency… and that sense of urgency makes the request sound either bossy or desperate, rather than considerate.”
The opposite is true in Britain, where a Could you move without a please sounds inconsiderate—and it sounds inconsiderate to me as an Englishman living in New York! To Brits, the please is like a polite, spoken emoji, conspicuous when missing. It’s as if we Brits wait at the end of the please-less request for the please to come. And when it doesn’t come, we’re likely to judge you as rude or obnoxious. To quote (the American in Britain) Murphy: “Ordering at a restaurant without a please sounds like ‘an army officer to a private’ or ‘a lord giving an order to his butler.’”
But it seems that going please-less may help me to connect better with Americans: Murphy uses the example of a study that found that (in the United States) adding please when taking orders for a charity cookie sale decreased the chance that a cookie would be ordered. It seems Americans reserve the use of please for when it is an actual plea, that is, a desperate situation, such as a plea from a student (to another student or a teacher) not to report him for cheating—a Please don’t!, for example. When the cheating student added the please to his plea, it doubled the chance that the teacher or other student wouldn’t report the cheating. That’s a desperate way to connect, but it works. My recommendation is that if, to an American ear, Excuse me, please sounds no friendlier than a bitch-slap Excuse me, then we switch it up to either (per Lynne Murphy’s suggestion) “Could you move?” or—and I imagine this sounds less bossy and will connect more—“Can I squeeze/get past?” But I warn you, if you say either without the please in Britain, you will disconnect, be considered a rude American, and offend the locals. When in royal territory…
Sorry and I go way back. As a child I helped out my father on the farm, erecting fences and mending machinery. I was afraid of my father. Maybe because he yelled daily when he was in his 20s and 30s (he was 18 when I was born), though he wasn’t ever violent. He was a lot bigger than I was and seemed like the most powerful man in the world. I was afraid of doing anything wrong in front of the man who seemed right all the time and who’d notice and yell if I didn’t get it right. It was this fear of doing something wrong that often caused me to make mistakes. I had to adapt in order to preempt his shouting. Sorry became one of my most frequently used words. I started using it for trivial things, like when asking to go to a friend’s house or if someone phoned the house asking for me, or if one of the neighbors wanted to play.
My father mellowed into an easygoing chap in his 40s, and in his 50s we became close as he helped me work through my life problems without judgment. He hasn’t shouted at me in years, but to this day I have to stay vigilant to keep my unnecessary sorrys in check.
It seems I’m not alone. Professor of Linguistics Lynne Murphy writes in The Prodigal Tongue that Brits often say sorry where Americans would say thank you—for example, when acknowledging that someone has held the door open for you. Murphy says that British people use sorry four times more often than Americans do. There’s more sorry trash blocking connections on the streets of London than real trash on the streets of New York.
My friend Brad Blanton gave me a copy of his book Practicing Radical Honesty in 2013. On the first page he wrote: You don’t ever have to apologize to anybody for anything. Why does all of this matter? When we say sorry, it primes our listeners to think that we have done something wrong, harmful, or offensive, and thus it creates a negative association with us, which disconnects them from us. Reserve your sorrys for the times when you have acted in a way that causes others to suffer. Now instead of saying, “Sorry, can I squeeze past, please,” I say, “Can I squeeze past, please?”
(F*cking ask me already)
We may think that we are polite if we preface a request with this question, but politeness often isn’t conducive to connection. Turns out that while the Americans have been doing this much longer than the Brits, the British English spelling of favour spiked more than the American English spelling around 2005. This virus of disconnection has spread across the Atlantic with the help of social media, but it took until 2008 for it to become as prevalent in British English as it had already been in American English in the 1940s.
Whatever specific task you were about to ask someone to help you with, you turned into something bigger than it needed to be by abstracting and generalizing it into a favor. We can’t connect with abstract. We can only connect with a specific connection point. “Can you do me a favor?” is like saying “Can you come do an unspecified amount of unpaid work for me?” We have no sense of the scale of what you are about to ask us, but the “Can you do me a favor?” primes us to expect something that is often more work than the specific thing you are going to ask us to help with. For example: “Can you do me a favor… and pass the salt?” (when I was expecting you to say “… and pick my kids up from school; look after them for the rest of the week; feed, de-worm, and walk my dog tonight; and come with me to this all-day fund-raising gala on Saturday?”). Just ask me already.
(do something you wouldn’t want to do)
This is the opposite of empathy in question form: “If you’d like to take the trash out for me…” Who ever really wants to take the trash out? Superimposing the idea that I would like to take the trash out is the verbal equivalent of you trying to create the desire in me by charging me with a weak defibrillator. Defibrillating a nonexistent desire amounts to kicking the rest of me, and it’s unpleasant. Here’s the second part I dislike about this connection killer: The only way to answer this request without being rude is to lie. Here’s why. Because you’ve now made taking the trash out conditional on my liking it. If I say, “OK,” and take the trash out, I am playing along with the lie that I like doing it—Taking out the trash is so much fun. You can tell from my body language and facial expression that I don’t want to do it—and I sure as hell know that I don’t want to do it—but we both go along with the lie of my wanting to take the trash out, which then creates a rift of falsity between us. If I tell the truth and say, “I don’t want to,” it puts you on the defensive—you may judge me as selfish when in fact it’s your own ego’s selfish desire for control that has prompted you to ask the question that is hard for me to say no to. There is a way to request putting out the trash that builds connection rather than uses force: Ask, “Would you be willing to take the trash out for me, please?” And once it’s done, follow up with a “Thank you. I appreciate you for doing that.” If she replies by saying, “I love taking the trash out,” call BS…
Before you react to what you are about to read, I’ll ask you for some patience: We will celebrate love, the noun, in chapter 11. As it was with thank you, so it is with love.
For now, I’ll define love as “the inspiration of deep affection.” We often bastardize and use it out of habit. Or we exaggerate and say love when we mean like, along with the other hyperbole of words like amazing that we looked at in chapter 2. Overstatement is so normalized that it is now built into—and reinforced by—the apps we use. Instagram converts something we click LIKE on into a hyperbolic LOVE heart. #Lovedevalued #Lovediluted. If liking is no longer enough for expressing like, then love is no longer enough for love. But there is no other word. When we say, “I love you,” and mean it—especially the first time we say it to someone and mean it—our sense of connection to the other person and to the moment is supercharged. Often, though, we don’t mean it. To know for sure if we do, we need to wait three months to notice if we’re still saying it (and feeling it), according to psychiatrist and author Dr. Fredric Neuman. More often than not, we say “I love” as an exaggeration. We cannot love things, only people and animals. I love it is a lie that risks weakening our expression of (true) love.
You like it, but you don’t love it. Indiscriminate overuse of love confuses and disconnects us from its meaning. When we feel love for someone, we may have difficulty expressing it because we’ve already used that word for something else. “After years of loving Doritos dipped in cottage cheese, I didn’t know how to express my feelings to Kanye.”
Who am I to say what I want? The introverted and some of the extroverted among you will empathize with me here: Sometimes I feel that telling someone what I want is too bold or entitled. It’s that old chestnut of not feeling good enough, not worthy enough, to have one’s own desires—that it’s somehow impolite to tell someone what you want. Here’s the thing: Polite is inauthentic, and inauthentic is a leading cause of disconnection.
At restaurants where either my boss or a family member was paying or where I knew I was going to split the bill at the end, I’d often find myself in an awkward place, familiar to all of us. I wouldn’t want to order an item more expensive than what I calculated to be the average for the table unless at least a couple of others were ordering the same dish—say, the filet mignon. Are others ordering appetizers? If a server came to the table and wanted to take my order, I’d ask him to go to someone else first. And if someone asked me if I wanted dessert before I knew if others at the table were ordering dessert, I’d say, “Maybe,” to avoid speaking the truth (which is “You’re damn right I want the chocolate mousse and the cheese course that follows, but I won’t order it because I don’t want to be the only one at the table eating dessert and I don’t want others to pay for it”). This is why I dislike maybe: It’s an empty nicety and often not true. We often say maybe as a way to hedge on what we want to say. Of course, in some cases the maybe is legitimate. If you don’t know the answer to whether it’s going to rain, but you can see clouds gathering, your maybe is your best guess at the truth. But when we know the truth, adding the maybe disconnects us. And that’s the maybe I want to talk about here—the maybe that’s interjected into a sentence that would have connected more with the recipient without the maybe in it. A well-known British doctor recently stated (on social media) that a tabloid journalist in the UK wasn’t being held to account for nonfactual, personal comments he made in his articles about British politicians. But instead of committing to a direct and public call to action to challenge the journalist, the doctor hedged his message: “Maybe someone could ask him whether he takes any responsibility.” Drop the maybe, and the call to action is stronger: “… Someone could ask him if he takes any responsibility.” Or even better: “Let’s ask him/Ask him if he takes any responsibility.”
Among the 80 SLPs at New York University, maybe was the most used of the 63 words in my study, averaging 1.32 (the most frequent rating possible is 1, the least is 5). Maybe is on the rise: Usage is now five times what it was in the 1960s. I imagine people were better at commitment back then, too, even if they did embrace free love. That’s in part because there were fewer choices in the 1960s. The variety of occupations available today has risen exponentially—try finding a vacant social media manager position 50 years ago. When we are not browsing jobs on LinkedIn, we can use apps to right-swipe and date a different person every day. And when we see an increasing number of our “friends” on Instagram somewhere in Colombia or at Machu Picchu—is a person who hasn’t been to Machu Picchu now rarer than someone who has?—or moving to Hong Kong, Sydney, or San Diego, we wonder why we aren’t moving somewhere, too. The advent of mass adoption of the internet has created a new and evolving virtual world, making it increasingly difficult for us to commit to one job, one romantic partner, one town. So, don’t be too hard on yourself when you catch yourself uttering a maybe. Just pay attention to it and ensure it’s what you want to say.
Another tag of noncommitment is the word kinda (evolved from kind of) and its less popular sibling, sorta. Rather than committing to a specific and more accurate description, we choose to abstract to a horoscope-level description of what we mean. Horoscopes cover many possible situations using a few abstract generalizations. But they are so nonspecific that they disconnect us from our reality. Instead of telling you, “I appreciate your making my car smell of caramel latte, but now I want one, too,” I say, “Thanks, now my car smells like caramel latte. Kinda hate you. Kinda don’t.”
Kinda is also used by ego as a marker of “cool.” If I drop a kinda when talking to my millennial acquaintances, my ego thinks it will increase my younger listeners’ perception that I’m dope, I belong with their crew, and they might invite me back to the crib. But kinda doesn’t connect with the specifics of what we mean or feel and, as a result, disconnects us from both ourselves and each other. Though it can sound cute, kinda increases the isolation we feel. It’s word trash, so throw it out of the sentence and connect. Instead of saying of one song (in a collection of three), “It’s kinda perfect because it’s the balance of its two siblings,” drop the kinda, and the perfect becomes stronger, the sentence becomes tighter, and it will pack more of a connection punch. Even better, throw out the perfect—more overstatement/hyperbole—and then you no longer need the because, and you can let the strength of your statement stand naked and unmuffled: “It’s the balance of its two siblings.”
We aren’t just using kinda more, we are searching for it more. The Google Trends Data on the following page shows the increase in health-related Google searches containing kinda from 2004 to mid-2018. As kinda increases mental isolation, people are increasingly trying to connect with it. Sometimes it’s the medicine we seek that causes our illness.2
Kinda usage was higher among the elementary school SLPs than their middle school counterparts (2.1 versus 2.32). If a child answers a teacher with an only partially correct answer, the child will likely feel more encouraged if the teacher replies with a kinda than a wrong! Kinda softens the blow of these statements when presenting them to young minds. But softening the blow also means sacrificing specifics, and therefore connection. Instead of kinda, why not say, “Well, that’s partly true. Also, this does…”
The allure of kinda is also in its softer sound, easier on the ears than direct specifics (or the equally nonspecific kind of). The open-mouth vowel ah sound at the end of the word is one of the easiest sounds for infants to create and imitate. Children have to force their mouths to create new consonant sounds—and, according to toddlerspeechinfo.com, k is one of the hardest sounds. After the effort of pushing out the consonants, the child can relax her mouth with an ah. It’s easier to say kinda than kind of. But both are substitutes for specifics and connection. And whether it’s kind of, sort of, or kinda, sorta, they are all disconnectors passed on by Dada, Mama, and Gaga.
Here are two fillers, tags of not committing to saying something directly (aka disconnecting). “He said, like, have dinner with me and I said, like, no.” If it was like no, then it wasn’t no specifically. If something is like something, it isn’t something. “It was like a cat.” So,3 it wasn’t a cat. “It was, like, hot outside.” So, it was warm?
As if there weren’t enough disconnection with the use of like and so individually, they are often used together. If you wanted to parody Paris Hilton, you’d intersperse your impression of her with several like, sos. It is like, so last decade. But it’s not just found in the language of the clichéd LA blonde or Kardashian wannabe. Go into any hipster coffee shop in New York and you will overhear these two words again and again. It is a marker of a lack of confidence. We are not confident enough to provide the specifics of what we mean, and like, so has become like, so widespread that it can seem strange not to use it. Its use is not restricted to the Americas—it’s rife in Australia and the UK to a degree that the Little Britain4 character Vikki Pollard personified it, along with her signature phrase yeah but, no but. Her character’s co-creator, Matt Lucas, said in a 2006 interview, “People didn’t talk like that 10 years ago, did they? People constructed sentences.”
By parodying these common phrases to the extreme, Little Britain did help to raise awareness of British word-trash habits, but we need a new show. The last episode was in 2005, and there have been 15 years of new word-trash accumulation since. I’ll make a plea here and now to any comedy screenwriters reading this to please create a new show that parodies the word-trash habits of 2020’s America, Britain, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand (or all five in one show). Some of these habits are global. I’d like to be a producer of this show. Tweet me.
Communications consultant Audrey Cronin and her colleague Phil Lam recognized the frequent use of like and so together as an audience disconnector, and created an app called LikeSo to help smartphone users train their speech against it. Here’s the app description from the iTunes store: “LikeSo is your personal speech coach. LikeSo offers a fun and effective way to train against verbal habits and practice speaking articulately, confidently and without all of those ‘like’s’ and ‘so’s.’” Another app, Orai, offers a more comprehensive vocal coach assistant to help reduce not only like and so but also any of your own filler words. The New York SLPs may benefit from this app, too: They often say something “was like so” when describing past situations (averaging 2.71 among those working in middle schools).
In defense of like users, it’s not just a filler word to avoid saying things directly—it has become a synonym for both said (when used with was) and for roughly or around: “He weighed like 200 pounds. And I was like, no.” That we can connect with, but it’s a stronger connection if you say, “He weighed around 200 pounds. And I said no.” When one word can be used instead of two (said instead of was like), use one to connect faster. And if you find yourself saying: “He weighed around, like, 200 pounds. And I said, like no,” it’s trash.
This brings me to another unnecessary phrase that’s often interjected into a statement and reduces how well it connects to the listener. When someone tells you that he wants to say something, it’s either lack of confidence or language bad habit turning him into a liar. He doesn’t want to say it, which is why he is giving you the I want to say first.
“I want to say no.”
“I want to say the coat was black, but it was a sort of navy.”
“I want to say parsnip, but it tasted like potato.”
(These are real-life examples two of my friends shared from one day of eavesdropping.)
In French, Spanish, and Catalan, people say that wants to say (for example, in French: Ça veut dire) more often than they say I want to say. And the usage is more widespread and has more history than in English. Danny Lawrence is a friend of mine and a former BBC host, linguist, and documentary maker. He relocated to Spain a couple of years ago to teach English and has observed much wanting to say: “I have noticed that English learners in Spain say this too much, since the expression does exist in Spanish and Catalan,5 and also in the third person, as per French, Ça veut dire. They tend to overuse it when wishing to clarify something.”
1 Google Ngram Viewer provides hundreds of years of word statistics. When you enter a word or phrase and click SEARCH LOTS OF BOOKS, it outputs a graph that represents the word use over time. Try it for yourself: https://books.google.com/ngrams.
2 That’s another true story—including that most antidepressants, with only one or two exceptions, only work (if at all) because of a placebo effect, yet they have real and harmful (chemical) side effects that create further illness—told by Johann Hari in his book Lost Connections.
3 You may have noticed that I have used so several times already in this book. The use here where it’s a shorter—and less formal—synonym for therefore isn’t harmful to connection.
4 Little Britain is a BBC-TV comedy series that parodies the dialects of British people.
5 In Spanish: quiere decir. In Catalan: vol dir.