How do we greet one another today?

One of the most striking, and lowering, aspects of lockdown has been the deprivation of human exchange, and especially conversation. We can talk to our immediate families but not properly to a wider range of humanity. The Zoom chat, with so many ordinary conversational features removed, is not the same thing at all. Conversation is fundamental to what we think of as our being, and I don’t believe we could go on long without it.

In view of how vital it seems to be, it’s strange that we rarely consider it seriously. About its main substance — the words used — we make all sorts of assumptions, many of which turn out to be wrong. I teach creative writing, and one of the first things novelists have to learn is that much of the dialogue in fiction rests on absurd and unfounded beliefs. People in life, unlike in books, don’t generally use each other’s names in speech unless they’re trying to sell them something. Nor do they change the subject with sentences beginning ‘Anyway…’ The word is usually reserved to cover a momentary embarrassment.

Some novelists have a naturalistic ear for dialogue, such as Henry Green in the 1930s:

‘Them girls is terrible I reckon,’ he said. ‘Trouble enough many of us ’ave had to get here without they refuse to serve you.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s quite all right now, thank you.’ Others, such as his contemporary George Orwell, believed that people might talk like this:

‘My dear Dorothy,’ said Mr Warburton, ‘your mind, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is in a morbid condition. No, dash it! It’s worse than morbid; it’s downright septic. You’ve a sort of mental gangrene hanging over from your Christian upbringing.’