Doesn’t it just drive you mental sometimes? When people say stuff like:
- have a nice day!
- thanks for sharing!
- missing you already!
I dunno, I suppose sometimes people are being sincere, but trite stock phrases like that have pretty much been rendered meaningless by overuse. And then there is phatic speech. To quote Robertson Davies: “phatic speech is talk intended to establish a sense of fellowship rather than convey any intelligent meaning”.
He gives an example in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks of painting his fence …
“passersby greeted me with remarks like, ‘Doing a little painting, eh’ or ‘ Well, I see you are painting your fence.’ A short-tempered man might have replied, ‘oh you’re quite mistaken: I’m making a fretwork watch-cosy for my Aunt Minnie,’ but I am not short-tempered. Such remarks, stressing what is obvious, are not meant to be taken literally.”
Though he goes on to say …
“There are a lot of people whose entire conversation is composed of phatic communion; carried to excess it earns them a reputation for phatheadedness.”
😀
Unfortunately, there do seem to be quite a few phatheads out there.
casa azahar 
Phatheads … rofl
A Danish friend of mine did a postdoc in the US – as he put it, “It took me the first several months of my stay to realise that ‘How are you?’ is not a question.”
With (another) Danish friend I once devised a very long and detailed answer to that (non-) question along the lines of “Well, fine – I mean my dog got run over yesterday and my mother just was diagnosed with … ” Approx 5 minutes of it. But in the end we didn’t expose any USAsians to it – out of mere pity 😉
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Ha!
Just like the correct answer to ‘how do you do?’ is ‘how do you do?’ 😕 My students learning English can never understand that one and I can’t explain it except to say it’s yet another stupid English thing.
Mostly I just 🙄 at most of these silly expressions and phatic speech stuff. Like ‘hot enough for ya?’ when it’s 45ºC and obviously more than hot enough for anybody. But sometimes, if caught in a bad mood, this stuff really makes me go gaaaaaaaa!
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I tend to answer ‘how are you’. Not in detail, but often quite honestly! The British tendency to natter about the weather is phatic conversation elevated to an artform, I reckon. Very few weather conversations are held with the intention of passing on information or ascertaining what conditions will be like in order to make clothing/activity choices.
David
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In the words of Samuel Johnson (he of the dictionary) – ‘Remember Boswell, in English “How are you?” is a greeting, not an enquiry about your health.’
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Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said ‘Everyone talks about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it’? 🙂
I also tend to answer the non-question ‘how are you?’ fairly honestly, and sometimes see jaws drop in dismay. It’s actually quite fun.
Thing is, I always ask this question as a real question. And I think most people I know do so as well.
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Possibly a bit of an aside – and who cares, it’s my blog 😉 – about when I first moved to Spain, after having lived most of my life in Canada and then a couple of years in England.
I was quite taken aback when people I passed in the hallways of my first apartment building in Salamance quite happily greeted me – good morning, good afternoon, whatever.
And in the lift! Now this was so totally unlike my previous Canada/England experiences – people actually said hello and smiled at me when they got into the lift. And maybe they’d ask me if I was new in town, and quite often did ask how I was coping with the HEAT, once they knew I hailed from Canada. Just stuff like that.
There was none of that *everyone staring at the floor indicator* nonsense, pretending there weren’t actually other humans standing next to them.
Yeah, probably all that was phatic speech, but in the nicest sense. Just acknowledging you, saying a bit of this or that. Much nicer than feeling totally invisible and ignored.
So phatic speech can and does serve a nice purpose at times.
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The correct response to ‘Have a nice day’ is, ‘Sorry, I have other plans’.
I might also mention that my Baltic States phrasebook includes the warning, ‘Do not say “How are you?” to an Estonian. He will tell you.’ Indeed, I do tell people who ask. That’ll teach them to be nosey.
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“Sorry, I have other plans”
😀
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Saw an interview with playwright Harold Pinter a couple of weeks ago. He hardly writes now, but he has written this short piece involving two people endlessly asking each other how they are, interspersed by bits of small talk, repeated with variations like,” well yes….good,,,,,apart from……you know, so how are you really? aprt from…..Oh you know……” And so on. I found it bloody hilarious. He acted it with Ruper Graves.
Sorry can’t find any reference to it. It’s very new and hasn’t yet been performed.
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You don’t say? Well I never. You doing a blog then? Nice weather for the time of year isn’t it? Do you come here often? How’re you doin’?
The last one is a Joey-ism 🙂 not a phat, but I think it counts.
Craig /|\
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