I was reading this Open Questions (by Joshua Rothman) post about whether the phrase “six seven” is brainrot or not. My kids have used this phrase; the twins for a short while, and Grant for longer. The older kids seem to be mostly over it (and since they don’t have any social media, they may not be as exposed to it, I suppose), but it still thrills Grant.

But enough about that. What really struck me in this article was the following:

This is certainly true—and yet linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists have long known that much of what we say is meaningless. In 1923, in a seminal essay titled “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski observed that, whenever people get together, they talk about a whole lot of nothing. “As much among savage tribes as in a European drawing-room,” he wrote, social life involves a lot of conversation in which meaning “is almost completely irrelevant”

I didn’t like reading that! It does improve, however:

“Inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things—all such are exchanged, not in order to inform,” and “certainly not in order to express any thought,” but just to create “ties of union.”

The “just” at the end there certainly feels like a very specific editorial choice by the author (which is Bronisław Maniowski, for what it’s worth, writing in 1923).

Our author, Rothman, continues on:

Phatic communication is like the verbal equivalent of primate grooming behavior: it’s a way for people to provide and experience connection and companionship. We’re so used to thinking in terms of written language, which almost always means something, that the idea of meaningless language might seem like an oxymoron. But when we’re dealing with what Malinowski calls “wingéd words, passing from man to man,” it’s often the case that “the conception of meaning as contained in an utterance is false and futile.”

I’m not going to quote the entire post, and you should read it for yourself (though a lot of it does have to do with “six seven”), but I find myself hopelessly and helplessly poleaxed by the realization that so much of phatic (spoken) language is meaningless and that it carries great meaning.

I’m going to try to make a connection here, and it might fall flat. In literary theory, I remember studying Claude Lévi-Strauss (I was looking at his wikipedia page to see if I could better jog my memory (no) and saw our friend Bronisław mentioned there), because something around the semiotics of this sentence “the conception of meaning as contained in an utterance is false and futile.” hit me as being particularly up his alley. I am not sure he’s the right guy, though! So we studied someone who could have been (but wasn’t definitively) Lévi-Strauss who focused pretty tightly on the semiotics of words as compared to their literal meaning. And the connection here I suppose is that Malinowski is calling these phatic communications utterly meaningless, but is also saying at the very same time that the literal words don’t carry meaning, but through engaging in the act of meaningless phatic communication, we build meaning. Whew. By the by, my worst grade in grad school was in literary theory, and perhaps that is obvious.

I expect that this is why “small talk” is so frustrating to extremely logical people and people who are autistic. It has no clear use, and doesn’t convey any necessary information. However, it carries subtle, almost secret, power. It builds bonds between people that smooth out everything else. It is a hidden connective force, that is all but inaccessible to some folks who aren’t able to parse this sense of unity from inane conversation. I imagine that we also build quite strong bonds from informative and deep conversation, so all is not lost on that front. As I reflect, I do think that I have more capacity for empathy for people with whom I’ve nattered with about nothing. While I do sometimes want a real answer to “how ya doing,” I don’t expect to do anything with the response but I do expect a connection, however slight. It’s a bit like saying “hi human, you humaning?” and hearing back “hi human, I too human are you humaning?” and having that be a meaningful way for us to be united for a moment as real people on a very deep and vulnerable level, that we would never get to realistically in 99% of cases. Microdosing human connection, maybe, is what I mean.