Humorous rhetoric (Illustrated edition)

Author: Kang Jialong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Michelle said, "I didn’t mean to bother you."
"You weren’t bothering me. Let me tell you what to do. Let’s get drinks together some other day."
(The next day, Michelle came over for "drinks.")
"Michelle, you’re driving me crazy. You can’t interpret everything we Americans say so rigidly. When I said, 'Let’s get drinks some other day,' it was just a white lie because I wanted to stop you from shouting under my window."
"Then just tell me you don’t want to see me, Michelle said sadly, 'but don’t ask me out and then break the date.'"
I felt awful: "Indeed, treating you this way makes me uneasy. The problem is, Americans are accustomed to saying 'let’s meet again soon' when saying goodbye. In this country, no one expects that promise to be kept. If we spent a lot of time having casual meals with every person we occasionally bump into on the street, we’d never get anything done." (See Arthur Buchwald’s "Let’s Meet Again Tomorrow," Overseas Digest, Issue 1, 1998.)
This American kept making his French friend "fall for it" and misunderstand him because he didn’t adapt his speech to his audience. He completely failed to notice his French friend’s cultural background: The French friend didn’t understand the meaning of American "euphemisms." When interpreting such "euphemistic language," they often rely on traditional French culture. "Man is a social animal," "One land nurtures its people." People from different societies have different cultural traditions. These habits often influence their language communication.
If rhetoric doesn’t fit the context, it affects communication. That is to say: For everyone, speaking appropriately is enough; there’s no need to measure speech as right or wrong, accurate or vague. The key to pragmatics lies in knowing what to say and what not to say. Whether what is said is true or not isn’t important—it’s about appropriateness. To measure whether speech is appropriate is to see if it meets the requirements of the communication purpose, audience, and content. Sometimes speech must be truthful and accurate, but sometimes, for confidentiality or to handle awkward situations, one can lie, speak incorrectly, or even change the subject ("diverting attention to something else")—or even refute or scold—as the following examples show.