Put-downs, if very funny, gain you a glory that endures maybe five or seven seconds, until the guffaws die down. Put-ups—quickie compliments based on fact-—gain you a person’s esteem for periods ranging all the way up to a lifetime.
Most of us are convinced we never hurt others, except on purpose. We feel totally in control of our traffic and refuse to believe we injure others in ways of which we’re blitheringly unaware.
Take, for example, “What happened to your foot?”
Anybody who’s ever limped in public, even for a few minutes, understands a peculiar human characteristic most people think is a failing of tropical fish only. We know that tropical fish swim harmoniously together in schools, swarms, and packs—until one of them develops a weakness, whereupon the others turn on him and devour him!
Humans know how to do it without teeth.
If you don’t happen to have gout, arthritis, or a broken foot, but know how to fake a good limp, take a limping walk around any block for research purposes. It’s amazing. Friends, doormen, even strangers come rushing to your side wanting to know what happened to your foot. People you’ve never seen before who are themselves late for work and obviously in a hurry will cross streets against heavy traffic to ask, “What happened to your foot?”
Vain people who enjoy the attention may welcome the question a time or two. By the end of the first dozen inquiries, however, all limpers are united in exasperation. Occasionally, very rarely, you’ll meet someone who doesn’t ask. That person will simply say, “Can I help you?”
That person wins the Silver Award. The Gold Award would go to somebody who saw you limping and didn’t say a word, if such a person ever existed.
Truthfully, now, you who don’t limp, you who only ask why others are limping—do you mean to annoy?
Of course you don’t. And it may confuse and anger you to learn that what you intended as a sympathetic outreach actually annoys the one to whom you’re reaching out sympathetically.
Only when you stop to think about it, only when you realize how many times he’s heard that obvious question already, does it all come clear.
The physical limp is easy to spot and easy to avoid mentioning, once you’ve reprogrammed your compassionate reflexes. It’s the invisible limping that can strike down good conversations without warning.
The person whose business just went under may not have a visible limp. He may enter the room with the stride of an Olympic weight lifter. That doesn’t mean fond feelings will sprout in his heart for the brilliant conversationalist at the party who asks, “Hey, I notice your store’s closed. What gives?”
If someone’s undergone a painful divorce, there are questions he’d rather be greeted with than, “Where’s your better half?” You say you didn’t know about his divorce? You say you were just trying to be friendly? Nice. Nice and unskilled. Nice, unskilled, and stupid.
In certain parts of America, it may still be fairly safe inquiring about the health and whereabouts of a spouse, provided you knew they were still sharing married life as recently as six months ago. In our fast-lane communities, though, you stand an excellent chance of having your “friendly” question rewarded with a laser-razor stare and the explanation that such inquiries might hereafter more fruitfully be directed to the spouse’s new spouse!
The safest course is never to ask about a non present spouse unless you’ve seen them leaving a party hand in hand within the previous seventy-two hours.
You think people can see your hands when they’re not covered by gloves. You’re correct. You think people can’t see your feet when you have shoes on. You’re correct. You think people can’t detect your negative feelings about them if you decide to keep those feelings under wraps and “communicate” nicely. You’re wrong! Negative feelings gush, seethe, drip, ooze—or at least waft—out of the most innocent-sounding conversations. To keep a person you don’t particularly like from realizing you don’t like him requires better acting ability than most of us have. Alas, like drivers who swear they drive better after a few drinks, we don’t notice our impairment.
We honestly believe we hurt others only on purpose.
Bear in mind, there’s no such thing as “casual” conversation, any more than there are casual bullets in a revolver you’re casually toying with in a crowded room. As long as there’s one other person present, anything you say has the power to hurt or help, to lacerate or ingratiate.
A boxer knows the difference between round one of a major title fight and a workout session on his punching bag. A pilot knows the difference between taking off in a fully loaded jumbo jet and sailing a paper airplane across his playroom.
In conversation, there’s no such difference. Obviously you play for higher stakes as you move from your family circle to the convention cocktail party, where the professional headhunter has told you to go impress the board chairman of the firm that owns the company he’s trying to get you placed with. Never mind. The best way to vaccinate yourself against the possibility of committing harmful, annoying remarks is to pretend you’re a soldier never on leave, always in combat; a gambler betting never for fun, always for money; a football player never in a game of touch with the neighbors’ kids, always in the Super Bowl; a singer never in the showers, always before a packed house at La Scala where the hard-to-please have plenty of ripe tomatoes in their lap ready to heave.
Enter the Golden Rule. Ask yourself, “If I were he, and he were I, and if he knew exactly about me what I know about him, what, then, would I least like and what would I most like him to bring up?”
Every diplomat knows the most important part of the conference is the agenda.
That goes for conversations, too.
* * *
A prominent TV interviewer was once criticized in a prominent newspaper for being a ‘‘gusher” What is a gusher? The writer told us that if that interviewer were to ask a singer, for example, where she was from and she said, “Peru,” he would gush in with maximum energy and say Peru! My favorite country!”
One summer night a business executive who was buying some radio time from me told me he was having some friends over to his home in Long Island for a backyard barbecue. He urged me to show up so he could impress his friends. I made a mental note that if he wanted me there to impress people, he must be a terminal case. I told him I was busy and I’d try to come but I couldn’t promise, and I thanked him for the invitation.
I knew I couldn’t come, but I wanted to avoid the sting of a rejected invitation. It’s annoying to be turned down under any conditions. If the person you’re inviting yawns in your face and says, objectively speaking, he can’t think of a less appealing prospect, it’s maximally annoying. Even if he says he’s sorry, but he’s just been elected president of Portugal and your party happens to fall on the date of his inauguration, it’s still annoying.
It’s a good idea to calibrate your rejection of an invitation you can’t accept according to the ability of the host to take it. If I’m dealing with a gutsy swinger in my own weight class who I know is secure, I’ll just say, “I can’t. I’m busy,” knowing my rejection will bounce like a gravel pellet off the hull of his battleship ego.
Once, however, I got an invitation by phone. I looked in my daybook and told the man calling that I was free and was looking forward to being with him.
My secretary said, “Are you crazy? You’re supposed to be in the Middle East that night.”
“I know, I know,” I replied. Then I explained that the host who’d just called me was a nice but inflexible middle European who brooded a lot when you turned him down, regardless of your excuse, and would brood even if you were to fortify that excuse with certified copies of your tickets and hotel reservations in Tel Aviv. She stared incredulously as I waited eight or nine minutes, called him back, and went into an elaborate apology for having misread my schedule, causing me, alas, to have to forgo the predictable pleasures of his dinner party for the trifling consolations of the Middle East.
“
He wants two things from me,” I explained. “He wants one hundred eighty pounds of Barry Farber present at his dinner party. He also wants the assurance that I hold him in sufficient esteem to accept his social invitations. If I do it my way, I can give him at least half of what he’s after.”
Anyhow, back to my executive friend who wanted me to show up at his backyard barbecue in Long Island. I had no intention of making it, or even trying. My business appointment was an interview with Zsa Zsa Gabor. (Ms. Gabor has her own list of annoying things people say, foremost of which is, “Gee, you sure look young to have been around so long!” Zsa Zsa explains that people, if they only took the time to study, would know that she isn’t as old as everybody supposes; she just started making headlines earlier than anybody realizes. Her first headline, she says, resulted when she was thrown off King Zog’s personal horse in Albania at the age of sixteen.)
Zsa Zsa and I had fewer delays in our taping than expected, which left us finished early, with a limousine waiting downstairs and no further plans for the evening.
“Wouldn’t it be fun and different,” I mused, “to drive up to his tacky outdoor barbecue in that limo and impress his friends—with not just a local radio personality, but with Zsa Zsa Gabor in person!”
I explained the setup to Zsa Zsa, and she agreed. Being southern, I anticipated the “southern” response to Zsa Zsa’s arrival. I expected my friend to come out to meet the car, see Zsa Zsa, levitate, cock back his head and yell, “Good God a-mighty, look who’s come to party with us!”
My executive friend is not southern. He’s northern. He greeted us as though Zsa Zsa’s attendance were part of a laboriously negotiated contract and the only question now was whether to bring legal action because I’d delivered her twenty minutes late.
“Meet Zsa Zsa Gabor,” I said, doing a pretty good job for a southerner of concealing my zeal.
“How do you do, Ms. Gabor,” he deadpanned, offering forth his hand as though he had no further use for it.
That man is clearly not a gusher. He is a prig.
If this were a role-model manual for children, I would make much of the fact that the TV gusher was eventually consigned to a middle-of-the-night time slot in which, if he were to interrupt one of his own commercials and say, “The Soviet Union has attacked the United States with nuclear weapons,” it would not cause a panic. And the “How do you do, Ms. Gabor” cool guy went broke.
Find a notch in the middle of the spectrum between gusher and prig from which you can “deal non-annoyingly.”
Conversation and sex have much in common. A new friend pleased with a low-key courtship can get annoyed when the more “ready” partner tries to rush things. Asking too big a question or making too big a statement too early in the acquaintance—before the signal flags say “welcome” can also destroy the possibility of what the French call rapport, that magical and mystical moment when two merging souls know that they have touched and, like expertly handled cymbals, emit harmonious chimes, whether they believe in such things or not.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” is permissible immediately.
“Is she by your first or second wife?” is not. It needs time; maybe not much time, maybe only minutes. But your Friendship Pass must first be punched by him, showing you’re entitled to proceed to that higher level of invasion.
“This election race is heating up nicely” is permissible immediately.
“If that Republican wins, I’m going to flee to my new condominium in Costa Rica” is not.
If he agrees with you, sticks out his hand, and says, “Put ’er there, pal,” he is, in his way, as annoying as you were by challenging him with a strong, specific political assertion early in round one of your interpersonal adventure together. (That’s what it always is; that’s die way to look at it—even the guy you’re wedged in beside at the buffet who opens the conversation by pointing out that you accidentally got crushed chickpea with sesame sauce on his elbow is off with you on an “interpersonal adventure”!!
Don’t assert. Don’t assume. Feel your way forward, like a nudist crossing a barbed-wire fence.
A man I know who spends more time polishing his profanity than Shelley spent on his poetry refuses to hire anybody who uses a foul word during the job interview.
“If I hire him and over the ensuing weeks he hears how I talk and chooses to talk the same way, that’s fine,” he explains. “But how dare a job applicant use an offensive word before he knows how I’ll cotton to it?”
Nowhere is the Golden Rule more necessary than in the area of inadvertently annoying others. We know hitting others hurts, so we don’t hit. We know pinching, gouging, biting, jabbing hurts, so we refrain. We sally in and annoy, however, blitheringly innocent of ill intent. We just don’t think before we talk. We don’t say, “Putting myself as closely as I can in his situation, would I appreciate what I’m about to say to him?”
If we stopped to think, we wouldn’t offend as much.
A five-second comment by him that his poem was accepted by the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce newsletter does not call for a five-minute summary by you about all the great poetry you’ve written that hasn’t been accepted by anybody! A simple “Congratulations” will do, followed by a question or two regarding the poets from whom he derives inspiration and his favorite time of day to write.
Take five minutes off—five, that’s enough. You need not adopt any posture or breathing pattern that makes you feel silly. Just get in a mood and mode that, for you, suggests meditation. Then concentrate specifically upon those “innocent” comments, questions, japes, and jibes that most annoy you. You’ll be aghast at how many of those very offenses you routinely visit upon others.
The ability to count to ten may not seem like such a big deal, and it really isn’t. The ability to recite the entire alphabet may not seem like such a big deal, and it really isn’t.
The ability to deal with others non-annoyingly may not seem like such a big deal, but it really is. Almost nobody can do it consistently.
We can all applaud actress Tallulah Bankhead, who once said, “One day away from him is like a month in the country!”
Don’t you feel you know exactly whom she was talking about? And it’s not you, it’s always somebody else.
The human mind is designed with huge tanks to hold self-‘ righteousness, but only tiny ones with minuscule capacity to hold self-doubt.
Why give anybody the chance to think of you when Tallulah’s line is recited?
“A gentleman,” don’t forget, “never hurts anyone—except on purpose.”
Getting to the Point
This is a book about Making People Talk, and yes, I know some of you already think it’s a book about getting what you want out of talk. You can’t get what you want unless you can get your conversational partner past your pitch and through to the point.
Getting to the point sounds like a goal we should all approve and applaud.
No disagreement so far. That comes when we try to decide what the point is!
If you want something from someone; if you want someone to say yes, what, precisely, is the point? Is the point to ask briefly and bluntly for what you want without beating around the bush? Or is the point to take your time and cultivate a mood between you and that person, to engender a relationship with that person that will make his yes a lot more likely?
Americans pride themselves on being get-to-the-point people. Israelis are even more so. If an Israeli senses an unnecessary adjective here and there or an irrelevant verbal waltz going on, he may interrupt you and say, “Look, we haven’t » got time. Start at the end!”
Europeans may not be as hair-trigger about it as Americans, but they, too, like to see at least the outline of an agenda come jelling through the verbal fog before too much time elapses. That insistence strengthens as we move from southern Europe up toward northern Europe.
As we enter the Middle East—except for Israel—there seems to be resentment at the very fact that ther
e is a point and a need to get to it. We can all visualize the Turkish merchant driving the American crazy by sitting cross-legged on a rug puffing on a water pipe making sure hours elapse before getting to—or anywhere near—the business at hand.
That, at least, is the superficial view. The reality—one that can be used to good advantage by all who take heed and practice this principle—is that everybody is more “Eastern” than he realizes, or cares to admitl
Those Westerners most exasperated by the syrupy delays of the East are like the caterpillar who, seeing the butterfly, nudges another caterpillar and says, “You’ll never get me up in one of those things!” We’re all more likely to say yes if we’re in the mood to say yes.
That mood is best achieved not by exhortation but by conversation; by talking in such a way as to make the other person want to talk back. That takes a little time. And that’s worth a little time.
No language yet has a word for it, but we’re aiming to achieve a breakthrough, a happy explosion, a gush of acceptance, the release of a hot geyser of good feeling that turns a humdrum meeting into a joyous occasion, reticence into enthusiasm, a forced communications chore into a free-flowing delight, a conversation you didn’t know how to begin into one you hope will never end.
Dag Hammarskjold, the second secretary-general of the United Nations, was a man of the West who undertook a sensitive mission to the East. The first “China shocker” of the postwar age was not Dr. Henry Kissinger’s pop-up in Peking that preceded President Nixon’s historic visit to Mao in 1971. Almost twenty years earlier, when Communist China was not merely a Cold War American foe but an official world outcast whose troops in 1950 entered the Korean War against American-led United Nations forces, the world was startled by word from United Nations headquarters that Secretary-General Hammarskjold was going to Peking.
It was widely known that among his major objectives was that of winning the release of twenty-one American fliers downed during that war, who were in Chinese captivity.
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