Conversation by Mary Greer Conklin (books to read in a lifetime .TXT) đź“–
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- Author: Mary Greer Conklin
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Its Deadening Effect on Conversation—Habitual Interruption—Nervous Interruption—Glib Talkers—Interrupting by Over-Accuracy—Interruptions Outside the Conversation-Circle—Children and Their Interruption—Good Talk at Table—Anecdotes of Children's Appreciation of Good Conversation—The Hostess Who Is "Mistress of Herself Tho China Fall."
CHAPTER VI INTERRUPTION IN CONVERSATIONInterruption, more surely than anything else, kills conversation. The effusive talker who, in spite of his facility for words, is in no sense a conversationalist, refuses to recognize the fact that conversation involves a partnership; that in this company of joint interest each party has a right to his turn in the conversational engagement. He ignores his conversational partners; he breaks into their sentences with his own speech before they have their words well out of their mouths. He has grown so habitual in his interrupting that he rattles on unconscious of the disgust he is producing in the mind of any well-bred, discriminating conversationalist who hears him. The best of talkers interrupt occasionally in conversation; but the unconscious, rude interruption of the habitual interrupter, and the unintentional, conscious interruption of the cultivated talker are easily discernible, and are two very different things.
We are accustomed to think that children are the only offenders in interrupting; but, shades of the French salon, the crimes of the adults! The great pity about this positive phase of interrupting is that all habitual interrupters are totally unconscious that they continually break into the speeches of their conversers and literally knock their very words back into their mouths. Robert Louis Stevenson pronounced this eulogy over his friend, James Walter Ferrier: "He was the only man I ever knew who did not habitually interrupt." Now, you who read this may not believe that you are one of the violators of this first commandment of good conversation, "thou shalt not interrupt"; but stop to think what small chance you have of escape when only one acquaintance of Stevenson's was acquitted of this crime. One must become conscious of the fact that he continually interrupts before he can cease interrupting. The unconsciousness is what constitutes the crime; for conscious interruption ceases to be interruption. The moment a good talker is aware of having broken into the speech of his converser, he forestalls interruption by waiting to hear what was about to be said. He instantly cuts off his own speech with the conventional courtesy-phrase, "I beg your pardon," which is the same as saying, "Pardon me for seeming to be unwilling to listen to you; I really am both willing and glad to hear what you have to say." And he proves his willingness by waiting until the other person can finish the thought he ventured upon. What better proof that conversation is listening as well as talking?
Sheer, nervous inability to listen is responsible for one phase of interruption to conversation. It is the interruption of the wandering eye which tells that one's words have not been heard. "The person next to you must be bored by my conversation, for it is going into one of your ears and out of the other," said a talker rather testily to his inattentive dinner-companion whose absent-minded and tardy replies had been snapping the thread of the thought until it grew intolerable. She was perhaps only a little less irritating than the man who became so unconscious in the habit of inattention that on one occasion his converser had scarcely finished when he began abstractedly: "Yes, very odd, very odd," and told the identical anecdote all over again.
There is another phase of interrupting which proceeds from the jerky talker whose remarks are not provoked by what his conversational partner is saying, with observation and answer, affirmation and rejoinder, but who waits breathlessly for a pause to jump in and tell some thought of his own. Of this sort of talker Dean Swift wrote: "There are people whose manners will not suffer them to interrupt you directly, but what is almost as bad, will discover abundance of impatience, and lie upon the watch until you have done, because they have started something in their own thoughts, which they long to be delivered of. Meantime, they are so far from regarding what passes that their imaginations are wholly turned upon what they have in reserve, for fear it should slip out of their memory; and thus they confine their invention, which might otherwise range over a hundred things full as good, and that might be much more naturally introduced." An anecdote or a remark will keep. We are not under the necessity of begrudging every moment that shortens our own innings; of interrupting our companion by our looks and voting him an impediment to our own much better remarks.
A less objectionable phase of interrupting, because it as often springs from kind thought as from arrogance, is that of the conversationalist so anxious to prove his quickness of perception that he assumes to know what you are going to say before you have finished your sentence in your own mind, and to put an interpretation on your arguments before you are done stating them. His interpretation is as often exactly the opposite of your own as it is identical; and, right or wrong, the foisted-in explanation serves only to interrupt the sequence of thought. As early as 1832 a writer in the New England Magazine waxed wroth to pugilistic outburst against this form of interruption: "I have heard individuals praised for this, as indicating a rapidity of mind which arrived at the end before the other was half through. But I should feel as much disposed to knock a man down who took my words out of my mouth, as one who stole my money out of my pocket. Such a habit may be a credit to one's powers, but not to one's modesty or good feeling. What is it but saying, 'My dear sir, you are making a very bungling piece of work with that sentence of yours; allow me to finish it for you in proper style.'" Tho one is inclined to feel that this author could well have reserved his verbal scourging for more irritating forms of impertinent interruption, it is nevertheless true that people are more entirely considerate who allow their conversational partners to finish their statements without fear of being tript up.
It is only lack of discrimination on the part of glib talkers to suppose that those who express themselves more deliberately are less interesting in conversation. The pig is one of the most rapidly loquacious of animals, yet no one would say that the pig is an attractive conversationalist. Pope may have been slow in forming the mosaic of symbols which express so superbly the fact that
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found,"
but his deliberateness did not dim the wisdom, or interest, or beauty, of his lines. Slow talkers, if allowed to express themselves in their own way, only add to the attractiveness of any group. Why should we enjoy characterization more in literature and in drama than in life? "Good talking," says Stevenson, "is declarative of the man; it is dramatic like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you should shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity."
The Gradgrinds of society who are always coming down upon us with some horrible and unnecessary piece of fact are another form of interruption to good conversation. They stop you to remind you that the accident happened in Tremont Street, not in Boylston; and they suspend a pertinent point in the air to inform you that it was Mr. Jones's eldest sister, not his youngest, who was abroad at the time of the San Francisco earthquake. If some one refers to an incident as having occurred on the tenth of the month, they deem it necessary to stop the talker because they happen to know that it was on the ninth. People are often their own Gradgrinds, interrupting themselves in the midst of a narration to correct some trivial mistake which has no bearing one way or the other on what they are saying.
Many otherwise good talkers are at times afflicted with aphasia and lose the simplest and most familiar word at just the crucial moment—the very word which is necessary to the point they wish to make. This happens more often with elderly people; and it was on such an occasion that I heard a catchword fiend, a moderately young person, use her pet phrase as a red lantern to stop better, if more halting, talk. "Mr. Black was telling me to-day about Mr. White's being appointed to —— what do you call that office?" implored the dignified matron. "Just call it anything, Mrs. Gray, a bandersnatch, or a buttonhook, or a battering-ram," impertinently suggested the glib undergraduate who had been applying these words to everybody and everything, and who continued to do so until she had found a new catchword as the main substance of her conversation. The infirmities of age, as well as the mellowed wisdom of it, deserve the utmost consideration, especially from youth; and in this instance deference in aiding the elderly woman to find her word would have been more graceful than pleasantry, even if the pleasantry were of a less spurious kind.
Conversation suffers from outside interruptions as much as from interrupting directly within the conversational group. Bringing very little children into grown-up company led Charles Lamb to propose the health of Herod, King of the Jews! Society is no place for young children; and if older children are permitted to be present they should be led to listen attentively and to join the conversation modestly. If a child ventures an opinion or asks a question concerning the topic he is hearing discust, he should be welcomed into the conversation. His views should, in this case, be given the same consideration, no matter how immature, as the riper views of his elders; he should be made a legitimate part of the conversational group. Either this, or he should be sent entirely away. There are no half measures in a matter of this sort. The parent's reiterated commands to "keep quiet," or "to be seen and not heard," interrupt as much as the child's prattle. Furthermore, many a child's natural aptitude for talking well has been crusht by older people stifling every thought the youngster attempted to utter. A bright young girl of my acquaintance was so supprest by her parents from the age of seven to fifteen that she early acquired the habit of never opening her mouth without first getting the consent of father's eyebrow, or mother's. A child thus treated in youth grows up to be timid and halting in speech; his individuality and spontaneity are smothered. Either let the children talk, meanwhile teaching them how to converse, or send them off to themselves where they may at least express their thoughts to citizens of their own
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