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The Do's and Don't's of Agreeable Conversation -
part 4
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On the other hand, if a person has special information on the topic, if it is his specialty, or if he has just read a book about it, or if he has just been there, then he may properly take more than his fractional share in the conversation. However, if it is his specialty then he must be cautious about two things: not to show impatience or register surprise at the ignorance of others; secondly, not to use such technical language or dwell on such minor points as cannot be within the common range of interest and knowledge of his hearers. If a miscellaneous group of people happen to get on the subject of poetry, verse, and free verse, a literature teacher might well become the dominant talker, but if he goes beyond such words as rhyme, meter, and figures of speech, into synecdoches and metonomies and catalexis, he will sound like a pedant trying to show off — and he will end by being a bore.
The determination to please others rather than one's self ought to give anyone the perception not to drag in subclassifications and details that cannot be of interest or value to nonspecialists. I still shudder at the mistake two of us made in Quebec, when we asked a certain man about the history and construction of the Quebec Bridge. We wanted a sort of bird's-eye view of the bridge. But our informant, who apparently had worked on the bridge, insisted on giving us a welder's blueprint of every brace. We could not get him off the topic of the bridge for two hours!
Much as I respect my colleagues in college teaching, I have long learned never in a general gathering to allow the topic of discussion to come within a stone's throw of anyone's doctoral dissertation. When a man has, for example, spent two years in burrowing through incunabula in tracing the phonological changes in Spanish of the Latin / in facere to the h in haber, one can sympathize with him if he yearns for a chance to throw his knowledge about a room for an hour. But the fact is that for even the average scholar the topic is merely worth an extensive footnote, not a whole appendix. Becoming technical or subclassificatory on one's specialty is akin to the matter of talking shop. In both matters the rule must be that one must not talk one's specialty or one's shop unless the company is of the same shop or has the same specialty. A little thought as to what will please others, not one's self or one's clique, will make this self-evident.
A further obligation for a good conversationalist is promoting a variety of themes. Not only must he not talk too long at any one time, but, especially if he had a dominant part in it, he should also manage it so that no one topic will last too long. He should unobtrusively facilitate a sort of rotation of topics. This is, of course, the specific obligation of the host. But a good conversationalist is always the complement of the host. People often say almost with a feeling of guilt, "We talked about everything under the sun." The tinge of guilt comes from the Puritan tradition that anything which was fun must somehow have something wrong in it. The truth is that good conversation should glide along gracefully from topic to topic and sometimes back to the earlier ones.
Related terms include speak spoken and how to improve your speaking.
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