TaleCatcher

What's not said

So does language set up our expectations, our view of the world? Does it narrow our view of our universe and possibilities into the grammar we use?

Somehow in conversation the other day I recalled how my niece Eliza had stood on a chair beside me while I peeled vegetables on a visit back to Tennessee, and clearly had something on her mind. She must've been about four. We stood there a while, me working, her watching, and finally she came out with it.

'Are you a little girl?' she asked.

I was over 30. I choked back a laugh. This was very serious, to her. 'No sweetheart. I'm not. What makes you ask that?'

'But you're not a mommy, so you must be a little girl.'

We went back and forth like it for a little while. In the US, or maybe just in East Tennessee, there are children, there are mommies, and there are daddies. My sisters may correct me (feel free). But the conversation has stuck with me. Clearly, at least at that point, for her there were no other options. Her language had not given her ladies, or women and men.

Language is a habitual thing. It is stretching to try something new with the language you use, even if it feels trite or silly. Try writing secret messages into the report that's giving you difficulty. Try sneaking a word or quote in that you wouldn't necessarily use. Or play a clandestine game of p.c. bingo, waiting to hear someone say all the words you're secretly looking for. Play with the language. Everything's in there, and an awful lot of it isn't getting a chance to get heard. 

Colour as value, and not

I've been enjoying watching Adele acquire language. Naturally this is a combination of the connections she makes between our language and the things we're talking about, as well as our feelings and attitudes toward things.

So I wonder when she uses colours to talk about value. I ask, pretending: 'Do you want coffee or tea?' She wants the pink one. We get this a lot. 'Which shoe do you want to put on first?' The pink one. 'Which leg did you bang?' You guessed it. I can only think that she has picked up from Elena that pink, anything pink, is a matter of inherent goodness.

It reminds me of how Ray's friend Robert in the deep south of the US told how his young son managed to completely miss the colour of his granddaddy's skin. Robert's dad is white, but Robert married black and his kids go to black schools. At dinner one night the son was making comments about 'that's just like a white person to do that...' and Robert stopped him. (Worryingly, the son said he'd heard such talk from his teachers.) Robert asked if he'd ever had a look at his granddaddy to see what colour he is. The boy swore his grandfather was black, even though he'd seen him many times. Robert got a photo of his dad and brought it for the family to look at. The boy was mortified to learn he had a white relation, even worse that it was the grandfather he adored. For him, black was the superior value, regardless of the actual pigment.

I'm impressed with kids' abilities not to see colour, but to see the person instead. It is to our shame that in the meantime, children assign words loaded with values to those people - they acquire the prejudice before they distinguish the tone of the skin.

Taming the wild things

I made this story once to try to describe part of what I do.

In the creation story, God created the animals, and they were wild. Adam lived with the animals, and after he got to know them a bit, he named them. Instead of just being surrounded by fur and teeth and feathers and tails, it was elephants and kangaroos and tigers and mice. They weren't any less wild for having names. But they were contained in his imagination. He knew what he was dealing with. Language made some sense of them.

Ideas sometimes run so fast around us they leave us spinning. I spend time with people and their ideas and help find the words to make some sense of them. It doesn't make them any less wild either. It just settles them in our minds.

Meaning what?

Mags went on a workshop at the Women's Enterprise agency and was coached in how to make her experience as a homemaker sound like the language that employers would want to hear. 'You've not spent five years negotiating the gas bill, you've been liaising with service providers,' they told her.

Good old Mags. 'Why do I have to talk this language? Why can't I just call it what it is?'

I think it's something about a shorthand, how if you can use certain phrases, then 'business' people assume you are familiar with all the context and culture that comes in that context. It's what language is meant to do, isn't it: it is how a particular culture communicates. The words are the surface stuff. The meaning is below that surface.

Of course this is the first lesson in basic Linguistics, and you get that in any first look at Plato ('The Cave'). Want a more modern example? Look up wug on wikipedia.

Now my girls seem to be operating in that space, that wug-space of what we're trying to communicate as opposed to what we say, the place behind the screen in the cave. Their meanings are completely separate from the words. Elena calls Adele a 'yoghurt pot' and she wails. It's complete nonsense, but the implied insult is very real to both of them. Elena shrieks with delight at Adele's hurt feelings.

What completely perplexes me then is when they start singing 'I'm a little woman, I'm a little woman' along with one of their musical toys. And then when Adele, not quite two, comes to me to announce proudly, 'I'm a little woman.'

These are the children who persist in only playing with the ladies in their little people sets. The men usually don't even come out of the box.

And so I can't leave it. I have to know if it's a loaded comment, or just neutral words they're throwing around. What does a little woman do? Is it good to be a little woman? A bad thing? What models are they seeing, how are they interpreting the female figures around them? They just go dancing away, singing it into the distance, leaving me confused. What are they trying to say? And is the word so loaded with connotations and meanings for me that I can't just treat it as non-language, same as 'chicken bomb'?

'I'm a little chicken bomb' - I'd feel a lot more comfortable with them singing that.

Tasty elephants

Elephants again.

There's the expression 'You can't eat an elephant all in one go. You have to eat a lot of elephant burgers.'

I get that. Slow down. Pace myself. Be patient, I'll get there in the end.

Being positive and constructive, I am using the inverse of this analogy to console myself. You see, I tried having the conversation about having something to say with my colleague.

I am going to have to start feeding her elephant burgers. Ho hum.

Byeya

Elena has coined the expression 'byeya' - as in hiya, but on leaving. I love this. It has all the greetings connotations of 'I see you and it makes me happy', but acknowledging the parting. To me it means 'I'm glad I will see you again.'

Byeya

Tone of voice

In the stories I tell, I realise my mother is turning into a quirky wise mountain woman. I hear myself saying, 'My mother used to say...' I never knew at the time the truth that was in these comments.

On my mind at the moment is 'Don't look at me in that tone of voice.'

It occurs to me because I'm reading the (absolutely brilliant) Malcolm Gladwell again. I do a lot of reading before I do storytelling sessions. And I've recalled his discussion of why doctors get sued. Turns out that it has more to do with how much time doctors spend with their patients, understanding them and respecting their understanding of what's going on in the visit, than it has to do with actual delivery of care. You can explore the idea more here, or better yet, buy Blink. (Just brilliant!)

Anyway, I've suggested that we 'content-filter' some of our customer calls at work and see what the NPS score would be ,if we could accurately predict based on the tone of voice, not the words, how satisfied the customer would be with us. Hey, let's go all the way and do some internal calls as well. It would be fascinating if it corrolated, if overall satisfaction really did come down to the tone of voice in which we talk to each other.

On conflict

Life's not all positive. We can react to it positively, but some things just stink.

I hope this blog isn't about putting a prettier clothes peg on your nose, and working your way through the stink. But sometimes I feel like it's all a bit too cheerleading. I stopped reading a blog because of that.

It's odd, because a) I thrive on a challenge, and you need some resistance in order for things to challenge; b) I believe Robert McKee's argument that conflict makes the story (in context of film and novel), and c) as a change agent, I spend a fair bit of time looking at what's not right. I guess the difference is that I try to then demonstrate how they could be better, and lead people there by example, rather than just moaning and complaining.

But you need a good dose of conflict - in life, in relationships, in work. If you think about it, even walking needs negative resistance. You can't walk on jelly.

Conflict gives you muscles.

The positivity thing is a point I've been mulling over for some time. And it's occured to me again, because I'm preparing to deliver the new tone of voice to our most influential. I'm looking at word clouds, and I've used one of the whizzy online tools (tagcrowd.com) to make word clouds to illustrate where our hearts and minds are, and how the things we dwell on come across in our words. I can see a shift in where we are, but I'm not sure we know how it should look. It's an interesting question - kind of an alphabetical transcription of an aura that hangs around us. What kind of words do I use?

Hang on, let's find out. I'll run everything from the blog from 2009...

I'm happy with this.

I especially like the 'sentence' read really something. :-)

High five

Elena, who's fast approaching her fifth birthday, has discovered some old-fashioned ways of communicating. One is two thumbs up with a cheesy smile and a wink. Nice. Thaks Mr Murray (her music teacher).

The other is a high five. She asked to do it in the bath tonight. It was a bit splashy, but fun. And got me thinking. What's a high five about?

When we're driving up the tiny Ketteringham Road and another car pulls to the side so we can get through (the road is only wide enough for one car at a time, but the countryside is stunning), we wave to the other driver. Nearly every time Elena asks why I waved.

It's for the same reason that when I was leading her, age 3, and Kim's three boys through Wymondham, we put our hand up to the driver who let us go across the pedestrian crossing. I said to the boys, 'Give him a wave.' They all gave big flappy hello waves. It wasn't quite what I had in mind, but made the same point: it's about acknowledging the polite gesture he made.

In most of our interactions there's something else going on besides the words. I've discovered the word for this is 'subtext,' and it's actually the space where our relationships live or die - where we build rapport or destroy our faith in each other.

I haven't thought all of this through, completely, but I'm sure there's something to the high five. If you think back to the people who used to do it - who weren't five years old - and really meant it, for them it was about really being in tune with each other, and understanding where the other was coming from, and sharing sheer delight in being there together.