The High Cost of Talking

ANON.

It is a difficult problem, but if the cost of labor continues to increase, a point will be reached at which the employer must seriously consider how much irrelevant conversation between employees, or between an employee and friends or acquaintances who share his society but not his toil, he can afford to pay for; and, having so decided, he must find a way to make his decision operative. Already, for example, it is with an indescribable emotion that the smaller employers of labor — we who need the carpenter, the plumber, the man-who-takes-care-of-the-lawn, the scrub-lady, or other members of the newest new rich — listen to the conversation of our nominal hirelings, and figure in our troubled minds how much it is costing us a minute. We are not mean: we are desperate — and the fact that we, too, are now and again insidiously lured into conversation with these nominal hirelings makes us more so. Labor is scarce; the deaf and dumb unobtainable, — even if we employed them they would stop work and talk with their fingers, — and the habit of speech, as we cannot but recognize in ourselves as well as in others, is older in history, far more widely practised, and far more difficult for the victim to get rid of, than any other.

Many thousand years ago this was a dumb world — a world that we may only faintly picture by trying to imagine ourselves living naked in trees. Judged by all modern standards, it must have been an odd life; but it had its pleasures, it was not dull. Primeval man (so I read in my Science History of the Universe) ‘romped and frolicked with his fellows.’ ‘ There were rhythmic beatings of the hands and arms, and some approach to song’; but it would have been a song without words, and what you or I, good reader, might have thought we were trying to sing about, even the Science History of the Universe does not know. The wisest of us, I judge, would have been mentally inferior to the average modern baby; but this is perhaps unjust to the sage; for whereas the baby learns to talk in an environment already provided with teachers, a vocabulary, and topics of conversation, this worthy fellow in the tree had to start with a single word of his own making, and could talk about nothing whatever until he had invented a name for it.

The idea staggers imagination, but so it was. Out of these rompings and frolickings, these mad, glad games of tag and hidey-go and leap-frog in the sunflecked glades of prehistoric forests now turned to coal, came the first words. Thus it may have happened that one of us sometimes got, as we now say, too ‘gay’ with another; a friendly tussle became too strenuous, and a protesting squeak meaning ‘Don’t bite my ear’ came by repetition to be generally recognized as definite speech, meaning, as the Dictionary now says, ‘ the apparatus of audition,’ not intended for biting. And having thus named his e-e-ee-e-e-yah! primeval man went, bravely on and tried to name everything else — a tremendous task not yet completed.

Nor, for that matter, have his descendants done much to perfect the instrument of communication which he thus sketchily invented, and which still remains sadly limited. ‘Many words,’ said Stevenson, ‘are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most we can hope for is by many arrows, more or less off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour’s talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought.’

Yet it is something if the arrows thus indicate the target; for so dependent is speech upon the receptivity and state of mind of the hearer, that many an honest sentence fails to describe its meaning, and many an honest thought gets distorted in the hearing beyond the subsequent recognition of the mind that thought it. Here, indeed, is a cumulative tragedy, the incalculable total of countless human misunderstandings, for which our ancestor prepared the way when he named his ear. And whether or not it would have been better if his ear had remained nameless is a question for individuals to answer according to their faith in the ultimate intention of evolution.

However it started, and to whatever humanly incomprehensible purpose, the practice of speech and the pursuit of labor have long been inseparable: one may even argue that, with the development of self-consciousness and conventions, speech has taken the place of romping and frolicking whenever two or more human beings get together. The literary-minded reader will recall the poet Thompson’s fine pastoral: —

And although the poet was thinking of agriculture in a coeducational phase that is no longer common, the most casual observation must realize that urban and suburban scandal equally well deceive the tedious time, that reaping is here symbolic of many another occupation, and that neither sex is reduced to noticeable taciturnity by the absence of the other. I have seen, and heard, ten or a dozen men, nominally busy at mending a highway outside my window; and, although neither the so-called gentler sex nor the social beverage was present, the affair sounded, and was in effect, very much like a tea-party — except that now and again one of the guests stopped talking, and scattered a shovelful of gravel, with a free, graceful, and generous gesture, over the roadbed. This they did in rotation, so that usually one guest was scattering gravel, and the function was progressive. It came leisurely into view far down the road to the east; it went leisurely out of sight far down the road to the west, leaving a pleasant impression of human companionship, though less romantic than the reapers made on Thompson.

It may yet happen, as things are going, that such toil as this will become coeducational also, that towns will recruit their street departments impartially from the new electorate, and that these sturdy highwaymen, each by the lass he loves, will bear the rougher part and mitigate her toil. There were, to be sure, contingencies that did not occur to the superficially observant poet: one member of the cheerful band might have set himself to mitigate the toil of a lass whom some other member loved, and then, as Mr. Thompson might (more ably) have put it, —

This, however, would be an extreme case, and fruitless efforts to kill with a pointed look would be more likely.

Under conditions that are still with wistful optimism referred to as ‘normal,’ no essayist with a heart could have wished to change an industrial convention by which conversation has been accepted (and paid for) as the companion of toil. It has been taken for granted that carpenters on a roof or plumbers in a cellar would deceive the tedious time, that the man-who-takescare-of-the-lawn would hold informal receptions for all passing friends and acquaintances, and so on through various employments, male, female, and mixed. The tongue of man and the tail of dog, it has been tacitly agreed, have this in common — each wags when the owner is happy; and well it would be if the tongue, like the tail, ceased wagging under other temperamental conditions. Talk and toil, it has been held, go together, separate yet inseparable, like the Siamese twins; nor is it remarkable that this phenomenon should have been taken as a matter of course; for each human repeats in his or her own personal experience the history of humanity, is born speechless, discovers with surprise and wonder the pleasure of conversation, and never wearies of practising it. Words, moreover, are the only currency in which the poorest can afford to be extravagant: each has a Fortunatus’s purse, and, however he plays the spendthrift, the purse is as full as ever.

Yet it must be admitted that a widower who does not dance, though he may with equanimity once a year purchase a ticket for himself and wife to the Policeman’s Ball, would be disturbed if policemen, summoned at night to capture a burglar in the second story, stopped on the way for an informal dance in the dining-room. The case is not so radically different from that of carpenters who pause in their carpentering for a pleasant chat, or of the manwho-takes-care-of-the-lawn who uses his rake to lean on while he discusses the political situation with the ashman. In all justice it becomes more and more evident that only the industrial occupation of his premises should be paid for by an employer, and that the social occupation should be paid for by the employee. In the case of the highwaymen’s party that I have mentioned, a distinction should be made between gossiping and graveling. But unfortunately this sound truth is not likely to be recognized by the conversationalists in soviet.