Remember the golf swing. The beginner, like the ape, will grab the golf club and make twelve major mistakes on the backswing and eighteen coming forward. If you’re Ernest, stay away from that “acting” and “painting.” Far away. At least at first.
Do not, Ernest, turn up that fire in your face and say, “Oh, you’re an actress? What have you acted in?” Do not say, “You paint, huh? Imagine that. Where can I see your paintings?”
Every tabloid editor knows something a lot of newspaper readers never learn. If the headline screams, “Actor caught in drug-sex raid,” many readers will wonder, “Gee. Actor, huh? I wonder if it’s anybody famous.” They’ll stop everything and buy the paper. The wise person saves his money, knowing from that very headline that the actor is not famous, because if he were the headline would shout forth his name and not just say “Actor.”
Same principle with Linda and her acting and painting. If Linda had ever starred, or even bit-played, in anything recognizable, that hostess would have emblazoned that fact right up there in the “headline” of her introduction. And if her paintings had hung anywhere except on her own walls and those of her most supportive friends, the hostess would have made sure you knew that, too.
The hostess and the editor have something in common. They both want “circulation,” which for both of them rises with recognizable names and achievements. Both work on the theory that, in the business of boosting circulation, if you can’t have a recognizable actor or painter, then at least have an actor and a painter.
So, Ernest, don’t go blithering into “What roles have you played lately?” Ask Linda something about acting and painting. You’ve seen TV interviewers soar with solid, real questions, and twist in righteous isolation with empty “questiony” questions. Make sure your questions are real.
(This is an excellent reason for trying to engender the best possible conversations at all times regardless of how little you care. Broadcast talk hosts make themselves sound so valid and exciting when they say, “I was talking to another star in your field the other day and she told me . . What Ernest teams from Linda may be the “dry log” that flares and heats up a more desired conversation at a later date, or later at that same party.)
Do you know what actors mean when they talk about the Method? Linda does. And, actress that she is, she’d love to play intellectual Florence Nightingale to an Ernest who broke__ down and admitted, “I’ve been hearing actors and actresses on TV all my life talk about the Method and, can you believe it,
I don’t even know what they’re talking about. This’ll be my big night, Linda, if you can take a minute and tell me what the Method is.”
Some might say, Ernest, you’re taking unfair advantage of poor Linda. She may get so energized she’ll bite your face. It’s her big night! Nobody ever took her seriously as an actress before. No director did. No producer did. No agent did. And no Ernest at a party ever did, either, because they all blundered in and asked, “Actress, huh? What are you in?” And, after Linda’s pained explanations that not all actresses are necessarily in anything, the whole subject of acting was too humiliating to bring back into the conversation for a curtain call.
So, Ernie, you’ve earned the right to step back and let yourself be warmed by the fire you started by treating Linda as an actress. Let her reverence for Stanislavsky shower down upon you. Or her contempt. Lawyers don’t care if they represent plaintiffs or defendants. It’s cases they want. Ernie wants material. He’ll jackpot out if he can just get Linda talking—not about why she hasn’t exactly appeared in a production yet, but about her art, about her love of art, and acting.
Linda the painter, likewise, does not need her new friend Ernie asking her to name the better galleries that have shown her work. Why not, this once, grant Linda the luxury—nay, the glory—of assuming she’s a serious painter and ask her the same questions you’d ask the reincarnated Van Gogh?
Where does Linda get inspiration? Where does she buy her paints? Does she make her own varnish? What was her toughest interpretation? What’s the most time she ever spent on one painting? The least? What’s the best time of day for her to paint? Does she have to see what she paints? If, for instance, she gets to the mountains in October two weeks after the leaves have lost their color, can she roll it all back and paint them the way they were? Why not? Which attribute of which painter does she most wish she could copy?
Ernie should remember some of Linda’s answers. The next time they meet, be it a year later, a week later, even later on that same evening, Linda will appreciate being recalled not as “that troubled little dreamer who thinks she can paint” but as “the artist who likes to do the subjects of Cezanne with the greens of Chagall in the morning like Picasso.”
I’ve been to parties jammed beyond the permissible limits of the fire laws with writers, producers, directors, actors, and designers, not one of whom has ever written, produced, directed, acted in, or designed anything recognizable or recollectable! They all seem to know it, and they give each other amnesty. The unwritten ethic in the air promises, “You don’t ask me, and I won’t ask you.” I’ll ratify your fantasy, you ratify mine.”
What’s in a name?
Everything you may need to turn conversational ice into steam without wasting time passing through water, that’s what.
Wasn’t there an ethnic joke about a man about to drown in water that was no more than knee-deep? Well, it’s true—not about any particular nationality, but about a biological group called people. We “drown” whenever we have difficulty making conversation with new people even though the “water” is only knee-deep.
With practice applying these principles, you will know the advantages of becoming a “good conversationalist.” You don’t need any principles, though, to know the pain of trying to get some good talk started from the middle of Glacier Number One when there’s only you and him alone together.
And yet, there it is—the biggest, most obvious, self-suggesting rescue possible literally screaming at you, “Here I am! Use me!” What’s the first thing you hear, the first thing that comes up, the very first thing you know about him?
Obviously, his name. There it is: easy to ask, willingly delivered, clearly announced, proudly proffered, and requests for repeats always granted without penalty! A person’s name is easier to find than a lake bottom through knee-deep water.
Shrewd investors know how to gain much from little. Learning about names offers you the chance to be a shrewd investor in time. Some Eastern religions consider you still in spiritual kindergarten even after eighteen years of study. An eight-year course in quantum physics wouldn’t qualify you to open your mouth to ask for bread at a table of major physicists.
A five-minute study of the names of the world, however, will make you a welcome and entertaining expert—possibly the greatest anybody at the ball has ever known. (The origin and meaning of names is an easy and fascinating study. Imagine, as you mobilize this magic, what a few hours of study might do.)
Charles Berlitz included an eleven-page chapter on names in his book Native Tongues. The time it takes to read it is about the average time it takes to get upstairs to a party from the lobby of the building in a city the size of New York or Chicago.
The study of foreign languages throws off some fun rewards. For years I’ve been waiting for a moment when three strangers are stranded between the mantelpiece and the buffet: a Mr. Deere, a Mr. Jelinek, and I. Immediately upon being introduce*4 * will say, “Are you gentlemen related?” They will look quizzically at me, then at each other.
“You must not have heard correctly,” one will say. “I’m Deere; he’s Jelinek.”
I will then say, “Oh, no. I heard quite correctly.” Whereupon I will explain that “Deere” and “Jelinek” are identical names—Deere means, of course, “deer” in English, while Jelinek means “deer” in Czech and several other Slavic languages.
There’s a way to pull things like that without being insufferable.
After t
hose few pages of briefing by Charles Berlitz, your pyrotechnic ability with the soggy, overlooked firecrackers of people’s names will light up the heavens. You could slip off your shoes, mount your chair, clink fork to glass for attention, and ask Messrs. Ferraro, Kuznetsov, Haddad, Kovacs, Herrera, Fernandez, Fabbri, La Farge, Fernand, Herrero, Kowalski, and Magoon if they’re all related.
And why not? Their names all mean “smith”!
Mr. Hidalgo, upon meeting you, may possibly welcome your opinion, to consider with those of all the other guests whose comments he’s heard, of the spinach sou£Q6. Chances are, though, he’ll have a harder time keeping his socks from being knocked off if you congratulate him on his noble origins. After all, Berlitz tells us, Hidalgo means “hijo de algo,” “son of something,” “son of somebody”!
Names have never been considered a target for serious study because they’re too much fun once you get into them to count as “work.” I can’t think of a more advantageous academic pursuit than a college semester devoted to people’s names!
Berlitz, in his eleven pages (which you must read slowly to stretch out to as much as five minutes of learning pleasure), reveals that many of the rulers of the principalities, dukedoms, and kingdoms of medieval Germany devised a system of taxing Jews by requiring that they adopt German names—and pay for them—on a sliding scale.
The most expensive names in what Berlitz calls this medieval shakedown were pleasant, beautiful, or poetic.
Rosenberg, for example, means “mountain of roses”; Himmelblau, “the blue of Heaven”; Morgenstem, “star of the morning”; Blumenthal, “valley of flowers” or “blooming dale”; Silberberg, “mountain of silver.”
Those who couldn’t spring for those first-class names could pay a little less and still hold heads high with the name of their occupation. Meier means “farmer”; Schneider, “tailor”; Goldschmidt, “goldsmith”; Wechsler, “exchanger”; Fischer, “fisherman”; Kaufxnann, “merchant.”
Names of colors could be acquired without burdensome fees. Grun means “green”; Weiss, “white”; Schwarz, “black”; Braun, “brown”; Roth, “red”; Grunfeld, “green field.”
Animals offered another alternative. Lowe means “lion”; Wolf, “wolf’; Fuchs, “fox”; Haase, “hare”; Katz, “cat”; Vogel, “bird.”
Names like Berliner, Hamburger, and Frankfurter indicate the bearers of those names came from the cities whose names precede the final er.
The poorer Jews were obliged to adopt names that carried an insult. Part of the American dream was the chance to drop those names and pick new ones at Ellis Island, but Berlitz says you can still find those put-down names in the chronicles of some of the German cities where we find records of names like Schwanz, which means “tail”; Eselkopf, “ass head”; and Schmutz, “dirt”!
Italian names can offer a lot of conversational openings. Any Italian name that indicates “a gift of the angels” or “a blessing” by the church, for example, tells us that the first bearer of that name was abandoned in a basket at the door of a convent or church and raised by the nuns.
Try it the next time you meet someone named Angeli (“the angels”), della Croce (“of the cross”), Benedetto (“blessed”), della Chiesa (“of the church”), Diodonato (“given by God”), or Santangeli (“holy angels”).
Some military dictators get credit for making trains run on time, others for eliminating unemployment. Once upon a time, people didn’t have last names. They only had one name. A series of long-forgotten dictators had to make Europeans adopt a family name. Many Europeans today credit Napoleon for that reform. Actually, the family name was pretty well established in Europe by the time he did his conquering.
In Turkey the family name was not compulsory until 1935 and in parts of Indonesia they’re still not to this very day. The first ruler of post-colonial Indonesia, Sukarno, was named just that, Sukarno. Under pressure from Western media he reached out and grabbed a handy first name, Achmed, so nobody would make a big deal of it!
Most of the captive peoples suddenly ordered to go find a suitable last name for themselves and their families, like most people everywhere, went quietly along with the new edict and adopted names that translated into their occupations: names like Farmer, Fisher, Smith, Weaver, Baker, Carter, Taylor.
Others, however, were dissidents and refuseniks. They deliberately chose the most ridiculous names they could think of just to show defiance to their new rules with their far-out radical reforms. The Amsterdam telephone book today, for example, still lists the forebears of those freedom fighters who proudly chose the names Nakengeboren (“born naked”) and Broek-Brun (“trousers-in-the-well”).
Try, without starting fights, to probe the origins of names like the Italian Mangiacavallo (“eat a horse”) and Malatesta (“bad head”). During the Watergate affair, columnist Harriet Van Horn saw no reason not to strike. She let her readers know the name Kleindienst meant “small service.”
Couldn’t you have held up your end of the dinner conversation more effectively in mid-1986, when American aviator Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua while carrying arms to the Contras, if you’d pointed out that his name means “rabbit’s foot”? Sure, he was unfortunate to have been shot down; but, on the other hand, he was the one crew member who had a parachute!
No name successfully defies the nameologist’s ability to make interesting conversation around it. You might wave the name Mary, for example, right on through customs as being utterly worthless as a conversation starter, until your new enthusiasm for knowledge teaches you that Mary means “rebellion” (Maryam in the original Hebrew).
Does John strike you as perhaps not the gee-whizziest vine in the jungle to swing on. Not so fast. The name John, coming from the Bible (like the majority of European first names), means ‘ ‘God is gracious. ’ ’ It comes from the Hebrew Yohanan. How many “Johns” know that? Even if their name is Jean, Hans, Juan, Giovanni, Ivan, Johann, Joao, Yan, Sean, loan, Ian, Yannis, Johannus, Yahya; or the female versions—Juana, Jean, Jeanne, Janet, Joan, Joanna; or the last name variants— Johannes, Janowski, Johnson, Jones, Jennings, Jenkins, Shane, Valjean, Giannini, Jensen, Jantzen, Ivanov.
All this piling on is not meant to make you an instant lapidary qualified and ready to cut, polish, set, and brandish everybody’s favorite jewel, his name.
It’s merely intended to demonstrate that the possibilities are endless, and a great deal of good clean fun. You can always, after exhausting the juices squeezable from the names at hand, switch into the name of someone you met the other day, or one you read about, or heard about, or just feel like bringing up. —Some names are too good for their own good. They become, not icebreakers, but the entire evening’s conversation. The hoariest of all possible stories that Jewish immigrants tell is the one about the young man whose original name was too long to use in America. His brother gave him a simpler one to give to the police on Ellis Island, something like Katz or Braun. In the up-gush of excitement over landing in the New World, his mind went blank when the uniformed immigration official asked him his name.
He thought and thought. When the official impatiently asked him his name again he said, ‘ ‘Shoyn fargessen,” which means, “I already forgot” in Yiddish. Without breaking bureaucratic stride, the official wrote down what that utterance sounded like in his Anglo-Saxon ear—“Sean Ferguson”!
That’s more than a joke. Don Prago and Mort Union were members of my college fraternity. Interesting names. When Prago’s grandfather landed in America, the official asked him what his name was. He didn’t understand. He thought he was asking where he was from. He happened to be from Prague, and said so. Again, the immigration official doing the processing wrote it the way he heard it, “Prago.” And today the original Mr. Prago’s great-grandchildren bear the name with never a thought that its genesis is in any way accidental, deficient, or infirm.
Mort Union told how his grandfather came to Philadelphia from Russia and saw the word “Union” carved i
n stone above the entrance to Philadelphia’s Union Station. His original name was too long and too Russian to use in America anyhow, so he decided to go ahead and use the name Union.
It is theoretically possible to bore someone with a detailed—and thus automatically flattering—analysis of his name. But it’s not nearly as likely to bore him as yet another comment on how lovely the hostess looks in her gown and how appetizing the finely diced white onions look with the green capers on the pink salmon on the silver tray.
You needn’t buy an orchard to take a bite out of a peach. And you don’t have to learn languages to recognize a few names and learn what they mean.
A little knowledge is a powerful thing.
Frenchmen sing “La Marseillaise.” Communists sing the “Internationale.” Israelis sing “Hatikva.”
Losers sing “Do You Know My Good Friend So-and-So?”
It can be fun to go prospecting for mutual friends when you’re introduced to someone from a city you come from or know well, but only when you’re playing slow tennis over a low net. The great game of Do You Know has no more place early in a flirtation than a Girl Scout picnic has on the Lebanese Green Line.
First of all, the search for mutual friends, particularly with all the excitement and energy that usually accompanies the discovery that the two of you have another city in common, is die first refuge of the conversationally impoverished. Flaunt first your conversational richness. There’ll be time later to find out if he knows your Aunt Minnie.
Moreover, you’re inviting, if not exactly a no-win, then at least a likely-lose situation. Sure, we’ve all played Do You Know and won. The new friend we fire the name at lights up and says, “Do you know Herman, too? My dearest friend!” The odds, however, are not good. New restaurants, shows, organizations, and small businesses are more likely to fail than succeed. Likewise, the one you ask “Do you know?” is more likely not to care particularly for that person than he is to like him. And the rules say that whatever he thinks of that person, he’ll immediately think of you.
Making People Talk Page 18