Every single day, I have this exact conversation at least sixty times over:
"Hello!" *Happy smile
"Hey." *No eye contact, fumbling for wallet.
"How're you doing today?"
"Good. How're you?"
"Oh, not too bad."
Literally - working at the bookstore doesn't leave a lot of room for unique, friendly conversation when there's a line of college students in a hurry to buy Fritos and get to their next class. It's funny - in high school, I took two years of French, and when we learned greetings, it went something like this:
"Salut!"
"Salut! Ça va?"
"Ça va."
And for some reason I always thought it was silly that you would answer a question with the same phrase, and it wasn't until I entered the customer service force a bit after that that I realized it was literally the same thing I was doing over and over again at work in my own language. Now, if they actually deign to ask me how I'm doing, I like to throw in a word like "splendiferous" instead of "good"or something odd like that. It's amazing what the usage of one different word will do in the flow of a monotonous, but culturally deemed necessity for polite conversation.
I'm not sure what this has to do with a lot of what I read, but I couldn't stop thinking about it in the ARGUMENT IS WAR/the structure of conversations section (there was also a bit with French in it - the difference between "avec" and "with" - and I just reread that last sentence, container and with!) that involves going through a "set of initial conditions" (Lakhoff and Johnson, 78). But I kept thinking about how each customer has control of that conversation I have everyday, not only because of our "the customer is always right" policy that any service job I've ever worked has, but because they are there on their own agenda, and not mine. You become invisible behind a service desk, almost - I'd say a solid 85 percent of the time. But it's so funny how a sudden shift in conversation can occur because of a single word. At the use of an unfamiliar word, I go from being a non-entity behind the counter to being someone on the same level as the customers themselves - they look up, smile, and make eye contact. It such a little thing - but I find it fascinating.
I thought that section was pretty interesting, too, about conversations. Reading your post now, it makes me think about computer scripts, how they are basically conversations, and even that metaphor is pretty cool: the idea that it is a "script" because it runs through a certain amount of lines, waits for a response, then finds the correct response to data it receives, and then runs until it has completed it's purpose, just like any normal dialogue. Now, you obviously aren't a computer because you've broken past that script and made your life much more alive and present that a lot of other people do (including myself), and THAT point reminds me of Uptaught and his computer that supposedly could grade English papers just as well as teachers, and the idea of writing that is "alive," just as there are certain metaphors that we may "live" by.
ReplyDeleteSo if we follow the scripts written out for us, are we living metaphors or are the metaphors living us? Free Will vs. Fate.