Yakety-Yak

A new colleague joined a magazine where I was working. He always looked people directly in the eye when speaking to them. When he shook your hand, he did so firmly and held it longer than necessary. He frequently repeated the first name of the person to whom he was speaking. His aggressively perfect manner put some people on edge; it was the subject of much bemused discussion. One day he confessed to being a fan of self-help books. The penny dropped. He was so over-trained in communication skills that he’d lost the knack of being natural. If he’d just once forgotten someone’s name or had a shy moment, I’m sure everyone would have warmed to him much sooner.

There’s something both charming and desperate about the project of self-improvement. But that’s not to say most of us couldn’t use some good advice from time to time. The quality of Deborah Tannen’s advice is of a far higher order than the robotic commands memorized by my erstwhile colleague. This is a good thing, as her books reach a lot of people. Her previous books include the best-selling “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” and the also popular “That’s Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships.” A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Tannen specializes in telling us how to turn talk into communication. She does this by providing us with tools for more intelligent listening to others as well as ourselves.

Like her other books, “I Only Say This Because I Love You” is a fluid mixture of observation, analysis and advice, presented in the chatty style of the women’s magazine article. Tannen culls her evidence from interviews, research studies, her own experiences, documentaries centering on family life and even novels.

A central tenet of the Tannen canon is Gregory Bateson’s theory of “messages” and “metamessages,” or “word meanings” and “heart meanings.” As Tannen tells us, the metamessage or “heart meaning” of “Do you really want to have dessert?” for example, might be “I’m worried about your weight and health” but could well be perceived as “I disapprove of the way you eat and look.”

Tannen also focuses on the notions of connection and control as well as “re-framing.” “In talking to family members,” she explains, “we strive to find the right footing on a continuum between closeness and distance

Family communications can be dark and swampy territory; Tannen, with her flashlight of common sense, is determined to lead us onto a higher, more harmonious ground. “Don’t sling insults; don’t resort to name-calling,” she advises us. “These tactics raise the heat without shedding light.”

So far, so good. But underlying Tannen’s work, her own metamessages are more contentious assumptions, such as her discussion, a la Venus and Mars, about the way males and females communicate. As part of her evidence, she asked pairs of best friends, 5, 10 and 15 years old, to sit in a room and talk. In all cases, the girls sat facing each other, making eye contact while the boys sat side by side, their eyes never meeting.

Her footnotes tell us that for this project, she was “helped by Patricia O’Connor, whose children and their friends participated.” I infer from this that the study covered a relatively homogenous group, at least in socioeconomic terms; it hardly appears to be a broad-based scientific study. When girls will be grrrls and guys will be gays and people otherwise deviate out of choice or nature from the “norm,” they may have trouble identifying with the fairly neat paradigms of Tannen World, though Tannen covers her back by claiming that she is dealing in generalizations that may not ring true for everyone.

The question is, do they ring true for enough people? Yesterday in the park I saw two women chatting while sitting side by side and looking off in the distance and two men so intent on maintaining eye contact as they walked that one nearly tripped over a dog. What should we conclude? That the people I saw weren’t normal?

Tannen says in her preface that the individuals featured in her examples “come from a wide range of backgrounds” including Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans and whites; the working class, middle class and upper-middle class; and lesbians, gays and straights. Yet unless she is making a point about cross-cultural communication, she doesn’t specify who’s what. “This omission,” she acknowledges, “could be seen as contributing to the invisibility of anyone who is not mainstream, but I see it as evidence of the universality of the forces that I describe.”

When we’re reading the scripts of actual arguments, almost nobody ever swears, and little kids in one example can count to 10 in Greek, but no one speaks the language of hip-hop. The author’s own exceedingly modest sensibilities are revealed by her use of the word “genital organ” where she might have had to write “penis.”

There is certainly a call for greater sensitivity to the ways in which we communicate with others, and following Tannen’s advice could certainly help many of us achieve a greater quality of intimacy and understanding in our most important relationships.

Yet the extreme popularity of such books as this troubles me. When pop psychology replaces philosophy as our premier mode of making sense of the world around us, it threatens to reduce the world around us to the world inside us. Read my metamessage: Excessive navel-gazing can result in a preoccupation with fluff.