Deflecting “How are you?” via Grice’s maxims

allthingslinguistic:

derplefurf:

A friend who’s going through rough times lamented to me that, when acquaintances ask her how she’s been, she doesn’t feel like it’s honest to say “fine”, and the acquaintances don’t actually want to hear the full story. I told her what I do in analogous situations: say any (at least mildly interesting) fact about something you experienced in the last few days. For example, “My cat got stuck in a cereal box today” or “I found a new brunch spot last weekend”.

This works because of the unspoken principles of conversation called Grice’s maxims, particularly the maxim of relevance: whatever you say in response to a question will be interpreted as an answer to that question, at least in spirit. And random facts can be interpreted as “here’s something that’s on my mind”, which people will take as a valid answer to “how are you”.

Push this too far and it breaks down; responding with “I cut my toenails this morning” will be read as a non sequitur and possibly rude. But anything that could plausibly be a story you would tell a friend will work for this. Plus, any followup questions will be on a non-painful topic!

I do a similar thing when replying to the eternal linguist question, “how many languages do you know?” 

I used to let that lead me into a list of languages with my precise level of fluency, which would make the other person say “wow” but not have much else to reply with, or a mini-lecture of how not all linguists speak a whole bunch of languages, which got tedious to keep delivering and other people didn’t particularly enjoy it either.  

These days, I mention just two or three languages, but I switch up which ones I mention depending on what I think the other person would be interested in talking about and what I’m in the mood for (French often leads into a discussion of Canadian politics, some people just give off a certain vibe that they’d be really excited about Latin, and so on.) When I’ve gauged it really well, I can get away with just mentioning a single language. Sample dialogues: 

“How many languages do you speak?” 
“Well, it’s really interesting living in Montreal because of course there’s so much French…”
*conversation now becomes about French in Montreal*

“How many languages do you speak?”
“French of course, and it was really interesting studying Latin in high school because…”
*conversation now becomes about Latin and/or language study methodologies*  

The Gricean part is that, like with “how are you?”, people never seem to notice or mind that they’re not getting a number in reply. “How many languages?” is a conversational gambit of “you seem like a person who’d be open to having small talk about languages” or “tell me more about your linguistic experiences” (the same way that “how many pets/children do you have?” is a common small talk question). I recently had a conversation on twitter about doing this for “how many instruments do you play?” when the number gets too big and difficult to quantify, and it seems like it would work there too, although I personally won’t be in the circumstances to test it.