So from reading the rest of Pinker’s essay I gathered that it’s always better to use implications when employing bribery! He showed the differences of implicating an ambiguous bribe verses using the maxims of conversation in bribery.
The fact that this indirect speech could be used for polite intensions or to cover your own butt with "plausible deniabilty" (393) is fasinating to me. I've noticed it in the past, because I love to study the way people communicate; I have just never figured all the connections between them. --Ammi Ross
I definitely thought the second half of the article was more interesting, maybe because today's discussion cleared up some of the terms and ideas. One thing I learned and like reading about was the term "creative vagueness" (398). Creative vagueness is related to how people do not set clear terms in agreements and briberies, but offer ambiguity in order to save face and do what they want.
I like the way Pinker always seems to work in a few jokes into his articles, and uses them brilliantly every time. He also doesn’t seem to hesitate to point out when a joke is messed up or just really wrong. I really enjoyed the little bit about the Dick Cheney and George Bush Jr.
One concept I learned from the rest of this article was the truth behind "Choosing Not to Know: The Paradox of Rational Ignorance". It makes complete sense to me that people hide their true meanings behind politeness and innuendo. I especially liked the example where a prestigious position was open, but there was no safe answer the candidates could give without showing their intentions. Teighlor Fortner
For example, the communal sharing: I would never have thought to look at a "healthy relationship" like that. I interpreted it as my parents: they share a joint bank account and whatever's on my moms plate is also on my dads!
The authority ranking stood out to me the most when this is something i am very familiar with because of the work I used to do and it brought back some negative memories. Steven Shelley
Pinker argues that, “off-record indirect speech acts coined for the occasion- hints, understatements, idle generalizations, and rhetorical questions- are the politest forms of all.” I had never thought about how we skirt around direct questions or commands by saying “could you”, “would you”, or “do you mind”. I think this is something most socially appropriate people do to avoid appearing rude, but I don’t think anyone consciously thinks about why they word a request in this way.
Reading the rest of this essay has really made me become more conscious how how I phrase requests. Pinker made several great points on how to phrase suggestions so that they don't damage either party. This is another way for us to save face.
At what point do we make the choice to sacrifice face and perceived loss of social status for something that we want? Because even if it takes a long time, it seems likely that everything has a chance to come back around.
I learned about the many different ways to say pass the salt and how some people can take that request as literal or subconsciously just pass the salt without a response.
I thought towards the end where he was talking about how sometimes having more knowledge of a situation can be a disadvantage. If they know something and say it, then it could backfire and harm them in the long run. Jonathan Bell
Pinker’s assertion that humor as a tool for challenging or maintaining authority I found to be incredibly interesting, because most of what we find “humorous” is often concerning a person with great power or some special talent. Nearly every Saturday Night Live episode contains some bit about the U.S. President, and taking Authority Ranking into light, it can make some comedy sketches seem more serious.
One thing I did agree with is the thought that, “we need to distinguish the kinds of relationships people have, and how each is negotiated and maintained, rather than stringing all forms of face threat into a single scale, and doing the same with all forms of face saving (392).” I agree with Pinker because it is true that we can’t communicate with everyone the same way. We also can’t assume that we will be interpreted the same way by every person.
I enjoyed the section about the dangers of vagueness, and the examples he used, especially the feminist revision example. I also enjoyed the ideas he presented for the answer to the question “Why do people feel indirect speech let them get away with hypocrisy?”
The second half of Pinker's Games People Play was, again, another informative read. One idea that I agreed with was, "Sometimes the mismatch is a one-time event, the result of a misunderstanding, the testing of a new relationship, or a unique exigency. This triggers the emotion we call 'awkwardness' and the events called 'gaffes' or 'faux pas'''.
After the discussion in class over the first part of assigned text by Pinker, I definitely felt more confident when reading this passage. Though I would not claim this is new information, I felt the scenario about Maxim Man and Implicature Man was very eye opening within its simplicity. It had me thinking about conversations and interactions between people in a new light. Kelsey Jackson
A girl asked me how I thought her perfume smelled. I responded overtly and said exactly what I thought it smelled like—decomposing garbage. Needless, she was offended...
One of the most humorous things I have read in awhile: "When a lady says no she means maybe, when she says maybe she means yes, when she says yes she's no lady. When a diplomat says yes he means maybe, when he says maybe he means no, and if he says no he's no diplomat. Feminist Revision: When a woman says yes she means yes, when she says maybe she means maybe, when she says no she means no. If a man persists he's a rapist.
This kind of comedic stuff that Pinker used definitely made me want to continue reading the entire passage.
I really enjoy the examples from movies in this reading. Having spent a few years of my life working in banking and sales I am no stranger to the types of conversation mentioned. It’s all in the wording. The use of vagueness is a part that particularly stuck out to me and interested me. It has been amazing to me how the wording of a request can make all the difference. I like to call it, the conversation between the lines.
"Do you have the ability" really is the literal term for "can you", a not-so-suprising fact since one of my teachers insisted on us asking "May I" rather than "Can I". If we ever made that particular mistake she'd always give the person a funny look and say "Well, I certainly hope you can use the bathroom".
Several of my teachers liked using that pun, actually. No wonder so many of my classmates became "Grammar Nazis".
I liked the part about the dirty faces and the fact that when there were two of them neither thought that it was themselves because they could see another dirty face. Cassie May
It was interesting to read what Pinker’s inclusion of the reporter Feiler doing his experiment with bribing maître d’s, and how he felt inappropriate doing it. Yet, once he got accustomed to it and didn’t have anyone turning him down flabbergasted while sending him away, Feiler didn’t feel so awkward about the bribes.
I have read every word of the assigned passage by Steven Pinker, and I have posted a comment on the blog. While reading the first portion of this section of the essay I kept thinking back to that incredulous math teacher I had in high school who often questioned the abilities of her students to use the restroom, or sharpen a pencil, or borrow a calculator. I kind of hated her for it. As I continued reading Pinker's essay I learned that the concept of Politeness is actually not polite to the hearer. This was an interesting thought, since the whole concept of Politeness is to avoid overstepping boundaries and being perceived as rude. Catherine Melton
What strikes me about studies like these are the attempts to put such nebulous concepts like politeness into scales and charts—like the one demonstrating Thomas Schelling’s Identification Problem. That puzzled me. I understand the difficulty of a speaker has in ascertaining how a hearer is going to translate his/her indirect/direct request, but quantifying it in a diagram seems funny. Perhaps it is helpful for visual learners…
We feel guilty because we recognize the different social classes and situations in which we are in a sort of solidarity with the other people around us. I find it very interesting that even if we do not know the people around us, we find some way to tie ourselves to the people around us. That is why, when we pay to get seated in front of the people who were already waiting, we feel like we have betrayed those people. Just like the unspoken, underlying meaning behind what we say to each other, we form bonds with those around us.
I found Pinker’s insight into politeness and the Politeness Theory to be interesting. It appears to me that a close examination of how and why individuals are polite is a decent way to help decode a person’s politeness in our own lives. Whether or not that is a good or useful tool at all is a different story, but I find it to be an interesting idea nonetheless.
I found it to be a societal and norm thing to ignore the literal meaning of an indirect request and we just do the task and pass the salt. Brown and Levinson, says we do this because, “…this saves face for both (the speaker and the hearer), especially the hearer with her desire for autonomy” (Pinker 390). It is such a paradox to me and Pinker continues to thoughtfully provide me tales to astonish.
I find myself making off the record request all the time, but have never really thought of them as request. It seems that particular form of wording is a polite way for an unconscious request - at least to myself personally it is unconscious. And the idea that others unknowingly understand it as the same is quite interesting. It is like we are so concerned with being polite, especially when asking something of someone, it comes as second nature.
Pinker brings up a good point, in that we would not ask someone whom we thought was incapable, unwilling, or sitting too far away to pass the salt. We ask certain things for the sake of being polite, much like many other instances in our culture. I’m not sure if this is a quality popular amongst Americans, or all English-speaking countries, but we seem to have a very passive-aggressive way of communicating.
People become frustrated by the difficulties of communicating all of the time, so to try to form a list of least to most polite ways to say things seems a bit impossible to me.
Comments can simply be ignored, questions can be answered with the wrong answer, but commands, such as “pass the salt,” demand a response. Skirting around your true meaning by trying to be polite is not always beneficial.
Pinker thinks that mutual knowledge can go even farther than just that. He thinks that mutual knowledge between two people, depending on what it is, has the power to redefine the relationship between those two individuals. I think that Pinker has a good point in thinking that sometimes what two people know about each other can really change the way they view each other and ultimately define what kind of relationship they might share.
. Does the common way we use our language make it nearly impossible to form true, lasting, and genuine relationships, like the discussion of couples commonly filing for prenuptial agreement? Are we all just so commonly thinking and speaking in ways that are implicative and divisive that our world has become that way as well? Are we dooming ourselves just by opening our mouths?
So you've read the rest of the assigned Pinker assignment.
So from reading the rest of Pinker’s essay I gathered that it’s always better to use implications when employing bribery! He showed the differences of implicating an ambiguous bribe verses using the maxims of conversation in bribery.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this indirect speech could be used for polite intensions or to cover your own butt with "plausible deniabilty" (393) is fasinating to me. I've noticed it in the past, because I love to study the way people communicate; I have just never figured all the connections between them. --Ammi Ross
ReplyDeleteI definitely thought the second half of the article was more interesting, maybe because today's discussion cleared up some of the terms and ideas. One thing I learned and like reading about was the term "creative vagueness" (398). Creative vagueness is related to how people do not set clear terms in agreements and briberies, but offer ambiguity in order to save face and do what they want.
ReplyDeleteCourtney White
I like the way Pinker always seems to work in a few jokes into his articles, and uses them brilliantly every time. He also doesn’t seem to hesitate to point out when a joke is messed up or just really wrong. I really enjoyed the little bit about the Dick Cheney and George Bush Jr.
ReplyDeleteOne concept I learned from the rest of this article was the truth behind "Choosing Not to Know: The Paradox of Rational Ignorance". It makes complete sense to me that people hide their true meanings behind politeness and innuendo. I especially liked the example where a prestigious position was open, but there was no safe answer the candidates could give without showing their intentions.
ReplyDeleteTeighlor Fortner
For example, the communal sharing: I would never have thought to look at a "healthy relationship" like that. I interpreted it as my parents: they share a joint bank account and whatever's on my moms plate is also on my dads!
ReplyDeleteBria Gambrell
The authority ranking stood out to me the most when this is something i am very familiar with because of the work I used to do and it brought back some negative memories.
ReplyDeleteSteven Shelley
Pinker argues that, “off-record indirect speech acts coined for the occasion- hints, understatements, idle generalizations, and rhetorical questions- are the politest forms of all.” I had never thought about how we skirt around direct questions or commands by saying “could you”, “would you”, or “do you mind”. I think this is something most socially appropriate people do to avoid appearing rude, but I don’t think anyone consciously thinks about why they word a request in this way.
ReplyDeleteAnna Talkington
Reading the rest of this essay has really made me become more conscious how how I phrase requests. Pinker made several great points on how to phrase suggestions so that they don't damage either party. This is another way for us to save face.
ReplyDeleteMary Dixon
At what point do we make the choice to sacrifice face and perceived loss of social status for something that we want? Because even if it takes a long time, it seems likely that everything has a chance to come back around.
ReplyDelete- Matt Calvert
I learned about the many different ways to say pass the salt and how some people can take that request as literal or subconsciously just pass the salt without a response.
ReplyDeleteI thought towards the end where he was talking about how sometimes having more knowledge of a situation can be a disadvantage. If they know something and say it, then it could backfire and harm them in the long run.
ReplyDeleteJonathan Bell
Pinker’s assertion that humor as a tool for challenging or maintaining authority I found to be incredibly interesting, because most of what we find “humorous” is often concerning a person with great power or some special talent. Nearly every Saturday Night Live episode contains some bit about the U.S. President, and taking Authority Ranking into light, it can make some comedy sketches seem more serious.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I did agree with is the thought that, “we need to distinguish the kinds of relationships people have, and how each is negotiated and maintained, rather than stringing all forms of face threat into a single scale, and doing the same with all forms of face saving (392).” I agree with Pinker because it is true that we can’t communicate with everyone the same way. We also can’t assume that we will be interpreted the same way by every person.
ReplyDelete-Tarra Ward
I enjoyed the section about the dangers of vagueness, and the examples he used, especially the feminist revision example. I also enjoyed the ideas he presented for the answer to the question “Why do people feel indirect speech let them get away with hypocrisy?”
ReplyDeleteNikki Ennis
The second half of Pinker's Games People Play was, again, another informative read. One idea that I agreed with was, "Sometimes the mismatch is a one-time event, the result of a misunderstanding, the testing of a new relationship, or a unique exigency. This triggers the emotion we call 'awkwardness' and the events called 'gaffes' or 'faux pas'''.
ReplyDeleteAfter the discussion in class over the first part of assigned text by Pinker, I definitely felt more confident when reading this passage. Though I would not claim this is new information, I felt the scenario about Maxim Man and Implicature Man was very eye opening within its simplicity. It had me thinking about conversations and interactions between people in a new light.
ReplyDeleteKelsey Jackson
A girl asked me how I thought her perfume smelled. I responded overtly and said exactly what I thought it smelled like—decomposing garbage. Needless, she was offended...
ReplyDeleteTyler Soden
Rocky Moore
ReplyDeleteOne of the most humorous things I have read in awhile:
"When a lady says no she means maybe, when she says maybe she means yes, when she says yes she's no lady. When a diplomat says yes he means maybe, when he says maybe he means no, and if he says no he's no diplomat.
Feminist Revision: When a woman says yes she means yes, when she says maybe she means maybe, when she says no she means no. If a man persists he's a rapist.
This kind of comedic stuff that Pinker used definitely made me want to continue reading the entire passage.
I really enjoy the examples from movies in this reading. Having spent a few years of my life working in banking and sales I am no stranger to the types of conversation mentioned. It’s all in the wording. The use of vagueness is a part that particularly stuck out to me and interested me. It has been amazing to me how the wording of a request can make all the difference. I like to call it, the conversation between the lines.
ReplyDeleteDevin Martinez
"Do you have the ability" really is the literal term for "can you", a not-so-suprising fact since one of my teachers insisted on us asking "May I" rather than "Can I". If we ever made that particular mistake she'd always give the person a funny look and say "Well, I certainly hope you can use the bathroom".
ReplyDeleteSeveral of my teachers liked using that pun, actually. No wonder so many of my classmates became "Grammar Nazis".
Kenia Starry
I liked the part about the dirty faces and the fact that when there were two of them neither thought that it was themselves because they could see another dirty face. Cassie May
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to read what Pinker’s inclusion of the reporter Feiler doing his experiment with bribing maître d’s, and how he felt inappropriate doing it. Yet, once he got accustomed to it and didn’t have anyone turning him down flabbergasted while sending him away, Feiler didn’t feel so awkward about the bribes.
ReplyDeleteI have read every word of the assigned passage by Steven Pinker, and I have posted a comment on the blog.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading the first portion of this section of the essay I kept thinking back to that incredulous math teacher I had in high school who often questioned the abilities of her students to use the restroom, or sharpen a pencil, or borrow a calculator. I kind of hated her for it.
As I continued reading Pinker's essay I learned that the concept of Politeness is actually not polite to the hearer. This was an interesting thought, since the whole concept of Politeness is to avoid overstepping boundaries and being perceived as rude.
Catherine Melton
What strikes me about studies like these are the attempts to put such nebulous concepts like politeness into scales and charts—like the one demonstrating Thomas Schelling’s Identification Problem. That puzzled me. I understand the difficulty of a speaker has in ascertaining how a hearer is going to translate his/her indirect/direct request, but quantifying it in a diagram seems funny. Perhaps it is helpful for visual learners…
ReplyDeleteWe feel guilty because we recognize the different social classes and situations in which we are in a sort of solidarity with the other people around us. I find it very interesting that even if we do not know the people around us, we find some way to tie ourselves to the people around us. That is why, when we pay to get seated in front of the people who were already waiting, we feel like we have betrayed those people. Just like the unspoken, underlying meaning behind what we say to each other, we form bonds with those around us.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI found Pinker’s insight into politeness and the Politeness Theory to be interesting. It appears to me that a close examination of how and why individuals are polite is a decent way to help decode a person’s politeness in our own lives. Whether or not that is a good or useful tool at all is a different story, but I find it to be an interesting idea nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteCody Baggerly
I found it to be a societal and norm thing to ignore the literal meaning of an indirect request and we just do the task and pass the salt. Brown and Levinson, says we do this because, “…this saves face for both (the speaker and the hearer), especially the hearer with her desire for autonomy” (Pinker 390). It is such a paradox to me and Pinker continues to thoughtfully provide me tales to astonish.
ReplyDeleteI find myself making off the record request all the time, but have never really thought of them as request. It seems that particular form of wording is a polite way for an unconscious request - at least to myself personally it is unconscious. And the idea that others unknowingly understand it as the same is quite interesting. It is like we are so concerned with being polite, especially when asking something of someone, it comes as second nature.
ReplyDeletePinker brings up a good point, in that we would not ask someone whom we thought was incapable, unwilling, or sitting too far away to pass the salt. We ask certain things for the sake of being polite, much like many other instances in our culture. I’m not sure if this is a quality popular amongst Americans, or all English-speaking countries, but we seem to have a very passive-aggressive way of communicating.
ReplyDeletePeople become frustrated by the difficulties of communicating all of the time, so to try to form a list of least to most polite ways to say things seems a bit impossible to me.
ReplyDeleteComments can simply be ignored, questions can be answered with the wrong answer, but commands, such as “pass the salt,” demand a response. Skirting around your true meaning by trying to be polite is not always beneficial.
ReplyDelete(Karlyn Hedges)
Pinker thinks that mutual knowledge can go even farther than just that. He thinks that mutual knowledge between two people, depending on what it is, has the power to redefine the relationship between those two individuals.
ReplyDeleteI think that Pinker has a good point in thinking that sometimes what two people know about each other can really change the way they view each other and ultimately define what kind of relationship they might share.
. Does the common way we use our language make it nearly impossible to form true, lasting, and genuine relationships, like the discussion of couples commonly filing for prenuptial agreement? Are we all just so commonly thinking and speaking in ways that are implicative and divisive that our world has become that way as well? Are we dooming ourselves just by opening our mouths?
ReplyDelete