The word "conversation" has become an all-purpose way to describe life, social interaction and intractable problems. People are invited by media outlets to be part of the conversation or start the conversation. It is a tricky proposition, since many who join the conversation are more interested in talking than in listening, but escaping the conversation seems increasingly impossible.
In the New York Times' Media Decoder blog on July 9, author Eli Pariser wondered what information will fight its way to the fore of "social sharing on Twitter and Facebook and actually show up as part of the conversation."
On the same day in The Washington Times, political science professor Stephen Farnsworth wrote that Virgil Goode Jr., U.S. presidential nominee of the right-wing Constitution Party, "is one of those really committed conservatives that want to be part of the conversation."
Canadian aid worker Steven Dennis used the word frequently when he spoke to the press this week after being rescued from captors in Somalia. According to CBC News, he said he will "take a break," adding: "I think the conversation of engaging in the suffering of the people in the world is a good conversation, and that conversation I will remain in. But how I will be engaged is really the question that I'll have to be answering."
This is more than a casual conversation around the breakfast table or a chat by chance at the office. The conversation is all around us, hectoring or seducing us into paying attention. If you're not part of it, you're missing out or shirking your civic duty.
Like the cloud on the Internet, where so much data is stored beyond the physical realm of the laptop, the conversation is simultaneously there and not there.
Leslie Savan discussed the phenomenon in her 2005 book Slam Dunks and No-Brainers, which bore the conversation-long subtitle "Language in your life, the media, business, politics, and, like, whatever." Conversation, she wrote, had joined "the elite corps" of clichés. It was the socially reputable synonym "for 'talk,' 'debate,' 'discussion,' 'discourse' or 'dialogue' … 'Talk's too informal, 'dialogue' and the rest are too high-falutin' to carry the social and political freight. But 'conversation' … is soothingly mutual and pluralistic."
In that sense, it is much like "journey," which has become the pop phrase of choice when describing life, progress, horrible times, fate or career slumps. It echoes the language of self-help books: that it is important to accept the journey, that there will be stumbles on the journey, that we are all on a journey just as we may all be part of the conversation.
This current sense of "conversation" harks back to its earliest use in the 1300s, when the word meant living among or dealing with others.
By 1511, it had acquired the additional sense of sexual intercourse. English law later referred to adultery as "criminal conversation," a tort (civil wrong) that was abolished in England in 1857 but is still on the books in some U.S. states.
For the record, 'conversation' derives from the Latin conversari, to keep company with or move about, from convertere, to turn about. That's also the source of convert, converse (as in opposite) and convertible, where young couples have, after prudently putting the top up, been known to engage in conversations.
The earliest reference to conversation as an exchange of words and thoughts is not found until 1586. By 1703, the term "public conversation" was being used to describe a public conference or discussion. Now it has wormed its way into every corner of our lives. "The dining table," said a teaser line in the Vancouver Sun on July 6, "whether wood, metal or plastic, should be part of the conversation, says designer Alykhan Velji."
That's right. Even our furniture is in on it. Pull up a conversation piece and speak your mind.