Menaker - A good talk: the story and skill of conversation

Copyright 2010 by Daniel Menaker

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Twelve

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Second eBook Edition: January 2011

Originally published in hardcover by Twelve.

Grateful acknowledgments are made to Xavier Dufail for permission to reprint the picture of the chimpanzees; and to Rockmasters International Network, INC. for permission to quote from If You Want to Be Happy.

ISBN: 978-0-446-55801-3

Highly entertaining truly a cri de coeur a persuasive case for why we need good conversation in our lives. It could just save the world.

Los Angeles Times

Refreshingly honest anecdotes A GOOD TALK evokes its subject by taking on a personal, conversational tone.

Washington Post

Menakers wit is evident throughout, and the tone is generally amiable, even avuncularand yes, conversational. He employs self-deprecation appealingly, and his allusions leap around unpredictably, visiting both high and low culture along the way.

Kirkus Reviews

Reading Menakers book feels like a pleasant, wide-ranging conversation with an inquisitive friend a convincing case for conversation as a basic human need.

Boston Globe

The uniquely human art of conversation, celebrated and deconstructed. Stop texting and check it out.

People

One of the publishing worlds great wordsmiths Menakers witty approach is evident almost immediately What makes a lasting impression is the parade of anecdotes about life in the corridors of The New Yorker and Random House, leaving the reader yearning for a full-scale Menaker memoir.

Publishers Weekly

How can a single book be so learned, so wise, so helpful, and so short? A GOOD TALK is a great delight.

Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausens Pier

Entertaining a scintillating book about the art of conversation Menaker is hardly the first to write about conversation. Socrates and Emily Post, among others, have had a few words to say on the subject; but he may be among the most engaging.

Buffalo News

A charming, useful, and entertaining approach to a fascinating topic.

Booklist

I might have guessed that Daniel Menaker could talk about talk with the same facility and charm that he can bring to any conversation. Still, A GOOD TALK, his lively analysis of the workings of social speech, comes as a delightful revelation.

Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States and author of Ballistics

For people who often find their way into conversational pitfalls, Menaker packs an entire chapter full of advice In the hands of a less-skilled writer, this topic could have drowned in textbook-style overanalysis, but Menakers book is filled with ample doses of humor and should be especially welcomed by wordsmiths and conversationalists.

Library Journal

The art of conversation is in decline, and Daniel Menaker has hastened that decline by writing prose that is so funny, surprising, and habit-forming that the reader is inclined to cancel all social engagements and stay in at night with this book. I dont know about you, but I find it hard to resist an author who compares Socrates to Columbo.

Mary Roach, author of Stiff

Be tongue-tied no more. Know what to do when the inadvertent affront occurs or a professional conversation suddenly veers toward sex Menaker explores the finer points of verbal exchange.

TheDailyBeast.com

Just when it seems our society has forgotten how vital it is to our health and well-being to have both intimate and public productive conversation, Daniel Menaker brings us A GOOD TALK. This intelligent and thoughtful exploration of human communication happens to be very entertaining, but more importantly it provides a road map for enhancing your own relationships with good talk.

Gail Saltz, MD, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Today Show contributor

THE TREATMENT

THE OLD LEFT

FRIENDS AND RELATIONS

THE WORST (with Charles McGrath)

For William and Elizabeth

I n this book I want to talk about the story and shapes and skills of conversation and also, ultimately, about conversations, no matter how transient they may be, as a kind of artifacta human art of great importance produced by all people everywhere. But lets start at the beginning. We can be certain that this exclusively human activity called conversation didnt start out particularly shaped or aesthetical. No one can know how language began, but that hasnt stopped anyone from speculating about the matter.

Ive always guessed that human language had to begin with grunts that developed into one or both kinds of pragmatically crucial first speech. One is naming or calling out of namesat the outset, of individual or groups of human beings, especially when they were out of visual range, as they might be in a hunting party; then of objects and animals and places and the weather. Something equivalent to our John must have been an early proper noun. Same with Mary, gazelle! hot! cave, lion! not tonight, and headache.

My other speculation about first speech is that it was orders or directions. Very close to naming. Lets say that the prehistoric equivalent of Mary had a daughter who would probably today be named Meghan. Lets say Mary was weaving a thatch of reeds for the roof of their hovel. Meghan, ten years old now and irritable about the fact that virtually nothingfrom jump rope to televisionhad been invented, was mooning and sighing around the hovel with nothing to do. Mary needed more reeds, a stack of which her John had piled up outside the hovel, so she grabbed Meghans arm and pointed toward the reeds and uttered something that eventually came to mean more or less Fetch! There followed a rash of people using this order all the time, until someone came up with the words Oh, Mom! and, probably later, Get it yourself.

By the way, there is a word for the study of the origin of language: glottogony. It turns out that a lot of academics subscribe, roughly, to the naming/orders glottological theory that has always seemed to me to make sense. Biologists, evolutionary and otherwise, have made their own contributions to the understanding of the development of language by demonstrating that somewhere between a hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, the human larynx migrated, through mutation and natural selection, in such a way as to facilitate speech, perhaps as a result of Homo going erectus on the savannas and veldts. (A short-story submission I once read took place on what the author referred to as the African sveltewhich, it now suddenly occurs to me, may be an accidental portmanteau of savanna and veld.) It descended a little and assumed an L shape. The larynx, I mean.