After more than a year of doing very little, it’s hard to think of anything to say to friends in the pub – as I found out
When you start to think about language, or look at it in any close sort of way, you quickly learn that it is a fascinatingly ineffective tool for the job at hand. So we have this handful of noises we can make with our teeth and tongue and throat, yeah? And we can stitch together a few of those noises into words. All the languages are ancient and inspired by one another, and possibly come from the same shapeless root. So all of the complexity of human thought and emotion is poured into the shapes of these grunts we came up with thousands of years ago, right? And that’s it now, we’re stuck with it as the primary form of communication. I am using the same set of tools as my ancestors did to try and describe mind-bendingly modern realities like millennial witches on TikTok who are obsessed with a green rock called moldavite. It seems like trying to make fire with a stone and two twigs. We should have moved on by now.
One of the most fascinating aspects of language, of course, is small talk, a special dialect we created to make time spent in a room with somebody slightly less awkward (if we had never evolved language, or society, we would not have either of these problems). It’s the beige, ambient noise we make at someone’s brother-in-law when we are forcibly introduced to them at a barbecue. So what have you been up to?, for example. And did you have to come far? Yeah it has been a bit grey lately, hasn’t it? It’s interesting you mention that, actually: normally I don’t really get hay fever, but this year I did. From early social interactions I have had since the easing of lockdown – I am now expecting some firmly worded “excuse me?” texts from everyone I have spent time outside pubs with over the past few weeks – I can safely say that 2021 is set to be the worst year for small talk on human record. We’ve either forgotten how to do it, or we have actively erased the function from our brains through lack of use.
