My Aunt
My aunt was born on Xmass eve. This is not a significant detail for Jews. If it is, it is probably a negative detail. Especially considering she was born in 1947. I had to check my memory with a website, but yeah, she was born on Xmass eve.
I use my aunt when I teach sometimes. Some years. To explain communication. And why I’m bad at it. And how one can be evil at it.
The story goes like that. I teach about the opening of phone conversations. Schegloff found that in the USA 499 calls opened with the call-taker saying “hello”. He then explained that phone conversation starts with the ring, which summons the call-taker, who answers the summons with the “hello”. I didn’t get the chance to argue with Schelgoff about it. At the time. But the story goes that in my family alone when we had the one land-line, we had about 4 different answers to the ringing of the phone. My parents might have answered with “hello”. My elder brother started with our last name, as they do in Europe. My older brother started with “yes” the fast and furious way to show you he does not have time for it all. I, on the other hand, started with a greeting. And here is where the story with my aunt comes into the picture.
She called one day. I tell my students. I was about 16 or so, at least according to the story. And I picked the phone up. I answered with my usual greeting. “Good evening,” I said. And then she said “good evening” back.
Now, if you know about phone calls, you know that the point of the summons-answer sequence is to keep the initiative of the call with the caller. However, since I did the greeting as an answer, my aunt greeted me back. And so then we had a silence.
The silence had many layers to it. Whose turn should it be? If we believe in Sacks’s erroneous view of interaction as A-B-A-B-A-B structure, then it should be my turn. Because my aunt spoke last, and so now it is my turn. But this was the early Sacks, before the turn-taking system. If we believe Schegloff, then the caller is supposed to talk in the third turn of the phone call, after the response to the summons. Alas, there was no response to the summons as such.
It gets worse. We also have the problem of recognition and identification. Does my aunt need to introduce herself, or was she recognized by her “good evening”? She probably did not know. She also probably did not know who answered the phone, because I and my two older brothers and my dad had practically the same phone voice by the time I was 16. We were all also around the house some of the evenings. So not only she did not know if she was recognized, she did not know who among her older sister’s husband or boys she was talking to.
And so we had a silence. A horrible silence of about a second or so. With this silence, I explain to my students, I am bad at communication. Not doing what is normal or usual. With this silence, one can see how evil can happen.
I usually end the story by saying that Schegloff could have never come up with the summons-answer sequence as the first moves in the phone interaction if his family had migrated to Palestine instead of the US.
No, not really. I usually end up the story I teach my undergrads in saying that “well, we didn’t like my aunt that much.”
My aunt was born on Xmass eve. She died on my mom’s birthday. “Well, we didn’t like my aunt that much.”