introducing yourself

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Here is a favo(u)rite passage of mine from Kate Fox's Passport to the Pub: The Tourist's Guide to Pub Etiquette:

Don’'t ever introduce yourself. The “Hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama” approach does not go down well in British pubs. Natives will cringe and squirm with embarrassment at such brashness. If your introduction is accompanied by a beaming smile and outstretched hand, they will probably find an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible. Sorry, but that'’s how it is. The British quite frankly do not want to know your name, or shake your hand – or at least not until a proper degree of mutual interest has been well established (like maybe when you marry their daughter). You will have to adopt a more subtle, less demonstrative approach.

In her book Watching the English (which I don't have with me at the moment--so this is from memory), Fox quotes the reaction of an American couple who were clearly upset and puzzled by this British behavio(u)r. They felt that it was some kind of cruel game for the British to withhold that basic information about themselves. The thing to understand here is this: the British sense of personal privacy is very different from the American one. Asking someone's name, even implicitly by offering yours, is a premature violation of that privacy until some goodwill has already been established between you.

I observe this all the time on the playground. The British parents strike up conversations, and may ask about each other's children's names (which they can then use to encourage their children to play together), but they don't introduce themselves. If you've got(ten) along very well, then maybe--but probably not the first time you've met--you might say 'By the way, I'm [your name here]' before you part company. Maybe.

I saw Better Half speak on two occasions with the mother of a little girl who is close to Grover's age. After the first time, he said "I think she might be someone I worked with years ago." Only at the end of the second (long) conversation did they do the "By the way, I'm..." thing, at which point they discovered that they had worked together and both had recogni{z/s}ed each other, but were afraid to approach the topic in case they were wrong. Contrast this to me meeting another American at a party--within five minutes we've established our names, where we're from, who we work for, and several points of common experience--places we've both been and people we've met who the other might have met. And I am an awkward American. I hate small talk. But establishing these similarities is de rigueur for American conversation (recall our previous discussion of compliments). Because I am awkward, and hyper-aware of certain interactional markers of foreignness in British conversations, I am completely tongue-tied on the playground. I know how not to start a conversation in a British context, but I consider the most common acceptable ways to start a conversation (commenting on the weather or the busyness of the playground) too boring/obvious to start with, so I get stuck.*

It was reassuring, then, to see some quantitative research backing up my own impressions and Fox's observations in Klaus Schneider's new (in-press) paper 'Appropriate behaviour across varieties of English' in the Journal of Pragmatics. Schneider compared the openings of small-talk conversations between teens at parties in Ireland, the US, and England. The majority of English teens (56.7%) start with a greeting only (e.g. Hi), while Americans prefer greeting + identifying themselves (60%) and sometimes explicitly asking for the other person's name. The Irish teens prefer greeting + what Schneider calls an 'approach' (73.3%), in which they refer to the context and evaluate it (almost always in a positive way). His example of an approach is Great party, isn't it?**

Looking at the elements of an opening separately, Americans are more likely to introduce themselves than to greet you with a hi or hello.  In the graph below DISC-ID means 'disclose identity'--i.e. introduce yourself.


(The figure is about a subset of the data, so the numbers don't match the more general analysis of the data in my earlier paragraph. The numbers don't add up to 100% because there are other things you might do besides these three--but these are the most frequent.)

While the data is from teens, it feels pretty representative of what adults do.

So, please, go to some parties and experiment with this and report back here. Just don't do your experiments on me. I'll be standing in the corner, pretending to notice something remarkable in my drink, trying to avoid all the pitfalls of small talk.

And in other news: 

• I've been pathetic about blogging here, haven't I? So I completely didn't deserve to be in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top 25 Language Bloggers this year, and I wasn't. (For the first time. I feel duly punished!) But have a look at the link for the good ones.
• The voters and the judges were kind to my Twitter account (even though they didn't identify me by my Twitter handle in the voting--it was strange). I made it to #9 there. Here's the full list.
• But I haven't been completely neglecting my writing-about-AmE/BrE vocation. Since the last blog, I've talked at TedXSussexUniversity on American/British politeness norms and at Horsham Skeptics in the Pub. I'll link to the TedX talk when it's on-line. The SitP talk is reviewed here. But don't read the review if you want to see me give the talk (too many spoilers!). I'm doing it again at the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub in October. A few other things are in the pipeline...

*In a cross-cultural communication course I used to teach, one of the readings was about Finnish culture, and the point that really stuck with me was that Finns are often puzzled (or maybe annoyed) by English speakers' need to state the obvious. Why say Nice weather!, for instance, when everyone can see what the weather's like? It made Finland sound like some kind of anti-small-talk Nirvana that I'd want to live in, but it's also made me super-critical of myself when I interact with Finns. There is no hope for me--I am awkward in every culture.

** Schneider also notes the predictability of the Great party! line:

Great is clearly preferred by speakers of IrE, but speakers of AmE make use of a wider range of lexical items. These include great, good, nice, especially cool and also fun, as, e.g.in Fun party, huh?