Common courtesy

I just got back from Tesco. In the just-under-ten-minute walk there I bumped into two of my coursemates. In the same walk back I bumped into two of the girls from the flat above mine, and two members of CU. On each meeting, both parties stopped, did all the hello/how are you?/how was your Easter holiday? stuff, said "see you soon" and went on our way.

Literally thirty minutes later, I couldn't tell you what any of them did over their breaks, and I'm going to make the fairly grand assumption that they don't remember what I did either.

This little essay is basically a continuation of that age-old question, "why do English people ask each other how they are when they don't really care?" This is of course a generalisation, but I'm as guilty of it as most. What's more, when people ask me how I am (unless it's a certain person in a certain context), nine times out of ten, I will say something along the lines of "I'm pretty good thanks, how about you?"

In modern conversations, certainly among my generation, we've managed to streamline these mini-conversations to be able to fit into a passing dialogue. This could be anything from,

"Hey mate, how are you?"

"Yeah, good, you?"

"Yeah. Cool, see you."

"See you."

to a slightly less coherent,

"'ight?"

"'ight." (with all the appropriate nods)

So, it's a common courtesy, and that's good, it keeps human interaction going strong, and I'm in favour of that.

However, if the dialogue includes "how was your Easter?" (for example), it makes the conversation too long to have in passing. This is also fine, providing there's something you actually want to talk about with the person (for instance, one of my coursemates and I caught up for a minute or so, and it was good). But here's where it becomes a problem:

One of the people I saw on my little Tesco trip, I know by name, but we're not all that familiar with each other. Said person is very nice, and I'm sure we'd get along in a social situation, so this is meant to be anything personal. What happened was that we'd just stopped, having done the little Easter bit (which had we not stopped, would've involved us walking backwards to say), but then we had an awkward silence before saying "cheers" (I still don't know what for) and parting ways.

And it was awkward. I cringed a little bit when I'd departed.

So why do we do it? Why do we ask a question that we don't really want to know the answer to in more than three syllables? Why do we answer the same question when we can be fairly confident the other party doesn't really care either?

Of course, as I said, there are exceptions, but it seems strange that if common courtesies create awkward moments in conversation, then why do we comply to them? That's not rhetorical; I'd really like to know.

I apologise if that came over as a rant. It may well have done. It was supposed to be more observational than anything else. I'll also clarify that I'm not going to be a douche and refuse to have passing conversations; that's really not what I was trying to say!

j.r.