What’s the point and where does it lead?
Originally published on Medium.com on 12/12/2023
Late in life I learned how to talk with strangers and to enjoy the experience. The ease I feel now in doing so suppressed an opposite tendency for a good part of my life to avoid strangers. The changeover came about, I believe, because I decided the impulse to engage with strangers didn’t have to go any further than a single encounter. It was sufficient in itself.
If I harbored an expectation that I was going to make a new friend of a stranger, I tended to get tongue tied and brain frozen, to come across as anything but friend material. My bad outcomes, I came to realize were likely due to my tendency to share more than was asked in a new meeting and less than was necessary.
There was another problem. I’m an out-of-the-ordinary kind of person. I mean by that that I have interests and background that not a lot of other people share. For instance, I used to think it important when I met someone to tell them I was a linguist, that I had an advanced degree in linguistics. It’s an important fact about me that people close to me know, though honestly few of them understand the designation in the way I embody it.
Over the years friends and relatives took my liking to study languages to be a kind of quirky character trait they could poke at and sometimes joke about. They’d assume, for instance, I should know where some obscure English word comes from and be disappointed when I tell them I’m not an etymologist. “A what? I thought you were a linguist. What’s this got to do with bugs?” I’m exaggerating, of course.
Strangers, though, will follow up on this declaration of who I am with the question, “How many languages do you speak?” It’s the wrong question to ask the kind of linguist I am, but correcting their misconception takes the conversation into an orbit not just rarified, but inherently dull. My dear mother never fully understood how I made a career of being a linguist. She told her friends that I worked for the government or in education. Sort of true, but widely skirting the reality.
Worse, trying to explain that linguistics is about syntax and phonology and how languages work causes people to reminisce about how much they hated grammar in school. You see the light in their eyes dim as they begin to realize “This guy is a dork and this conversation isn’t going anywhere I want to be.”
But what changed in my approach is that when you’re truly dealing with an actual stranger, there’s no need to tell them anything about linguistics or any of the other arcane details of who you are. I avoid divulging that information or wait until we’ve progressed far enough along that they will no longer see me as dorky when the boring truth finally has to come out. At that point they may have developed enough of an interest in the other things I am that my linguisticness or linguisticity (linguists do neologisms) isn’t an impediment.
One of those compensating things that I am, and maybe the most important one, is that I am curious. It is one of the defining characteristics of a real linguist that we like to hear people talk. We like the substance, of course, but also the delivery. The syntax and phonology interest us, not just the message. And the best way to get someone to talk is to ask them questions.
That in a nutshell is how I have learned to successfully interact with strangers. Be openly curious about them.
I remember one time when I joined a gathering at the Supreme Court when the justices were debating whether to approve gay marriage. These kinds of events always are guaranteed to attract not just advocates, but also opponents. So there were a substantial number of sign carriers of the angry religious right with their God hates fags messaging. One such sign carrier was a young man and I decided to exercise my curiosity and find out why he was there. I told him I was gay and was curious about who he was, where he was from, and why he believed God hated fags. I knew how he would answer that last question, but leading into it set me up as non-adversarial.
It turned out he was from Texas, 1500 miles away. He was 28 and married with two children. He said he funded his own way to DC, so I asked him about where he worked and how he’d gotten time off. I felt, but didn’t say, that he fudged his answer. I suspected that he had been paid to travel and to carry that sign. But I didn’t challenge him.
The conversation progressed to a somewhat deeper level when I asked him what he would do if one of his kids came out as queer. “I’d throw them out of the house,” he said with no hesitation. Given the Christian “inspired” message of his sign, I mentioned that him sending his erring child out of his home didn’t seem to be an especially Christian thing to do. He hesitated this time.
We concluded the conversation shortly after, me wishing him a safe trip home and he wishing that I find Jesus. It was altogether an interesting, and maybe even a productive talk with a stranger and linguistics never came up.
An upshot of this strategy of engaging with strangers is that it works mainly or even only, in a one-to-one encounter. It doesn’t work in group settings, probably because you can’t direct a question to all members of a group. You’ll come across as not interested in individual answers, just in the statistics of the answers. Or you’ll come across as asking leading questions to which you already know the answers. You’re not curious about the answers. You’re trying to gather sheep into your flock.
This limitation on my tactic for questioning strangers accords well with another feature of my personality. I pretty much swing to the introverted side on the human interaction spectrum. So group interactions are always a little fraught: heightened pulse, wet pits, flushed face, over monitoring of my speech, struggling to find words, worrying about how well it’s going. The thing is, though, that over the years my career has made it necessary to learn how to do them. But the stage fright is always there and I will always be glad to leave the party.
You would think that bars would be a great place to meet strangers, particularly bars in unfamiliar locations where everyone is guaranteed to be someone you don’t know. But bars typically don’t work either, I suspect because they attract extraverts and where you’re expected to be one too. It’s a group-think, flirtatious, and chest-thumping environment. And personally I suck at all that.
So, the long and the short seems to be that the strangers I engage with tend to be the check-out clerk, the farmer’s market vendor, the disoriented tourist, the mail carrier, the person I sit next to at a concert, and, of course, the occasional political demonstrator. None of them know I’m a linguist.
The benefit of all this seemingly uneventful engagement with strangers is that occasionally you meet someone who shares the same high regard for curiosity as you. You’ll both start off trying to pry bits of info out of each other and eventually come to realize that you’re kindred spirits, who aren’t put off by telling each other what are not so boring details after all. And, lo and behold, you have the makings of a friendship.