Phatic
Speech
This is
Malinowski’s term for speech used as a social cement, things said in which the
meaning of the words is less important than the mood they establish. “How you
doing?” in American speech is not really a question. Nor does the questioner
really want to know how the person questioned is doing. The phatic phrase
cements social connections. It’s a way of saying “I’m okay and you’re okay, and
I acknowledge your existence.”
Those not in
the know, foreigners or renegades may sometimes break the rules of phatic
intercourse. In answer to the American question, “How you doing?” they may
begin telling the questioner all their troubles. If they do that they will soon
discover that the social-cementing questioner is not interested in hearing
their troubles.
Certain phatic
utterances get hardened with long usage over centuries into set forms that are
truncated. For example, “Good-bye” was originally “God be with you.” When I
began writing my novel Hard Mother in the mid-seventies of the twentieth
century, I set certain passages in future time, at the turn of the Millennium.
I assumed that by that time the process of truncation would have begun working
on certain phatics.
“Have a nice
day” was only beginning to be used widely back then. It, like “How you doing?”
really has no semantic meaning. Nobody cares really whether you have a nice
day, but it cements the social connections. In Hard Mother I used the
word “Hagity” as the future truncated form that would replace “Have a nice
day.” I used “Soomay,” as the form that would replace “Yes, you may.” But here
we are in the year 2020, and neither hagity nor soomay has yet
materialized. Hang on, though. Some day they will, a few centuries into a
future that may, or may not, arrive for us homosapiens.
[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]
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