Why Don't You Say What You Mean

8/12/2019 Why Don't You Say What You Mean

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Article 9

Why Dont You Say WhatYou Mean?

Directness is not necessarily logical or effective. Indirectnessis not necessarily manipulative or insecure.

Deborah Tannen

A university president was expecting avisit from a member of the board of trust-ees. When her secretary buzzed to tellher that the board member had arrived,she left her office and entered the recep-tion area to greet him. Before usheringhim into her office, she handed her sec-retary a sheet of paper and said: Ive

just finished drafting this letter. Do youthink you could type it right away? Idlike to get it out before lunch. And wouldyou please do me a favor and hold allcalls while Im meeting with Mr.Smith?

When they sat down behind theclosed door of her office, Mr. Smith be-gan by telling her that he thought she hadspoken inappropriately to her secretary.Dont forget, he said. Youre the pres-ident!

Putting aside the question of the ap-propriateness of his admonishing thepresident on her way of speaking, it is re-vealingand representative of many

Americans assumptionsthat the indi-rect way in which the university presi-dent told her secretary what to do struck him as self-deprecating. He took it as ev-idence that she didnt think she had theright to make demands of her secretary.He probably thought he was giving her aneeded pep talk, bolstering her self-con-fidence.

I challenge the assumption that talk-ing in an indirect way necessarily revealspowerlessness, lack of self-confidence

or anything else about the character of the speaker. Indirectness is a fundamen-tal element in human communication. Itis also one of the elements that variesmost from one culture to another, andone that can cause confusion and misun-derstanding when speakers have differ-ent habits with regard to using it. I alsowant to dispel the assumption that Amer-ican women tend to be more indirectthan American men. Women and menare both indirect, but in addition todifferences associated with their back-groundsregional, ethnic and classthey tend to be indirect in different situa-tions and in different ways.

At work, we need to get others to dothings, and we all have different ways of accomplishing this. Any individualsways will vary depending on who is be-ing addresseda boss, a peer or a subor-dinate. At one extreme are baldcommands. At the other are requests soindirect that they dont sound like re-

quests at all, but are just a statement of need or a description of a situation. Peo-ple with direct styles of asking others todo things perceive indirect requestsif they perceive them as requests at allasmanipulative. But this is often just a wayof blaming others for our discomfortwith their styles.

The indirect style is no more manipu-lative than making a telephone call, ask-ing Is Rachel there? and expectingwhoever answers the phone to put

Rachel on. Only a child is likely to an-swer Yes and continue holding thephonenot out of orneriness but be-cause of inexperience with the conven-tional meaning of the questions. (Amischievous adult might do it to tease.)Those who feel that indirect orders are il-logical or manipulative do not recognizethe conventional nature of indirect re-quests.

Issuing orders indirectly can be theprerogative of those in power. Imagine,for example, a master who says Its coldin here and expects a servant to make amove to close a window, while a servantwho says the same thing is not likely tosee his employer rise to correct the situa-tion and make him more comfortable. In-deed, a Frenchman raised in Brittanytells me that his family never gave baldcommands to their servants but alwayscommunicated orders in indirect andhighly polite ways. This pattern rendersless surprising the finding of David Bell-

inger and Jean Berko Gleason that fa-thers speech to their young children hada higher incidence than mothers of bothdirect imperatives like Turn the boltwith the wrench and indirect orders likeThe wheel is going to fall off.

The use of indirectness can hardly beunderstood without the cross-culturalperspective. Many Americans find itself-evident that directness is logical andaligned with power while indirectness isakin to dishonesty and reflects subservi-


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Article 9. Why Dont You Say What You Mean?

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ence. But for speakers raised in most of the worlds cultures, varieties of indi-rectness are the norm in communication.This is the pattern found by a Japanesesociolinguist, Kunihiko Harada, in hisanalysis of a conversation he recordedbetween a Japanese boss and a subordi-nate.

The markers of superior status wereclear. One speaker was a Japanese manin his late 40s who managed the localbranch of a Japanese private school inthe United States. His conversationalpartner was Japanese-American womanin her early 20s who worked at theschool. By virtue of his job, his age andhis native fluency in the language beingtaught, the man was in the superior posi-tion. Yet when he addressed the woman,he frequently used polite language and

almost always used indirectness. For ex-ample, he had tried and failed to find aphotography store that would make ablack-and-white print from a color nega-tive for a brochure they were producing.He let her know that he wanted her totake over the task by stating the situationand allowed her to volunteer to do it:(This is a translation of the Japanese con-versation.)

On this matter, that, that, on theleaflet? This photo, Im thinking of changing it to black-and-white and making it clearer. I went to a

photo shop and asked them. Theysaid they didnt do black-and-white. I asked if they knew any

place that did. They said theydidnt know. They werent veryhelpful, but anyway, a place must be found, the negative brought toit, the picture developed .Harada observes, Given the fact that

there are some duties to be performedand that there are two parties present, the

subordinate is supposed to assume thatthose are his or her obligation. It wasprecisely because of his higher statusthat the boss was free to choose whetherto speak formally or informally, to asserthis power or to play it down and buildrapportan option not available to thesubordinate, who would have seemedcheeky if she had chosen a style that en-hanced friendliness and closeness.

The same pattern was found by a Chi-nese sociolinguist, Yuling Pan, in a

meeting of officials involved in a neigh-borhood youth program. All spoke inways that reflected their place in the hi-erarchy. A subordinate addressing a su-perior always spoke in a deferential way,but a superior addressing a subordinatecould either be authoritarian, demon-strating his power, or friendly, establish-

ing rapport. The ones in power had theoption of choosing which style to use. Inthis spirit, I have been told by peoplewho prefer their bosses to give ordersindirectly that those who issue baldcommands must be pretty insecure; oth-erwise why would they have to bolstertheir egos by throwing their weightaround?

I am not inclined to accept that thosewho give orders directly are really inse-cure and powerless, any more than I

want to accept that judgment of thosewho give indirect orders. The conclusionto be drawn is that ways of talkingshould not be taken as obvious evidenceof inner psychological states like insecu-rity or lack of confidence. Consideringthe many influences on conversationalstyle, individuals have a wide range of ways of getting things done and express-ing their emotional states. Personalitycharacteristics like insecurity cannot belinked to ways of speaking in an auto-matic, self-evident way.

Those who expect orders to be givenindirectly are offended when they comeunadorned. One woman said that whenher boss gives her instructions, she feelsshe should click her heels, salute, and sayYes, Boss! His directions strike her asso imperious as to border on the milita-ristic. Yet I received a letter from a mantelling me that indirect orders were a fun-damental part of his military training: Hewrote:

Many years ago, when I was in the Navy, I was training to be a radiotechnician. One class I was in wastaught by a chief radioman, a reg-ular Navy man who had been tosea, and who was then in his third hitch. The students, about 20 of us,were fresh out of boot camp, withno sea duty and little knowledge of real Navy life. One day in class thechief said it was hot in the room.The student didnt react, except tonod in agreement. The chief re-

peated himself: Its hot in thisroom. Again there was no reac-tion from the students.Then the chief explained. Hewasnt looking for agreement or discussion from us. When he said that the room was hot, he expected us to do something about itlike

opening the window. He tried it one more time, and this time all of us left our workbenches and headed for the windows. We had learned. And we had many oppor-tunities to apply what we had learned.This letter especially intrigued me be-

cause Its cold in here is the standardsentence used by linguists to illustrate anindirect way of getting someone to dosomethingas I used it earlier. In this

example, it is the very obviousness andrigidity of the military hierarchy thatmakes the statement of a problem suffi-cient to trigger corrective action on thepart of subordinates.

A man who had worked at the Penta-gon reinforced the view that the burdenof interpretation is on subordinates in themilitaryand he noticed the differencewhen he moved to a position in the pri-vate sector. He was frustrated when hedsay to his new secretary, for example,Do we have a list of invitees? and betold, I dont know; we probably dorather than Ill get it for you. Indeed,he explained, at the Pentagon, such aquestion would likely be heard as a re-proach that the list was not already on hisdesk.

The suggestion that indirectness is as-sociated with the military must come asa surprise to many. But everyone is indi-rect, meaning more than is put intowords and deriving meaning from wordsthat are never actually said. Its a matter

of where, when and how we each tend tobe indirect and look for hidden mean-ings. But indirectness has a built-in lia-bility. There is a risk that the other willeither miss or choose to ignore yourmeaning.

O n Jan. 13, 1982, a freezing cold,snowy day in Washington, Air FloridaFlight 90 took off from National Airport,but could not get the lift it needed to keep


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Why Don't You Say What You Mean