small-talk

Mrs. P.? Oh no. She__ the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Bel, if there__ one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it__ the availability of quality staff . . ._ The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again.

Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.

I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. But with you there may be peace. You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence.

Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,_ she said, __as because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism__nd of American life? On a day that I don__ spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It__ my main form of social interaction__s it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.