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CHAPTER 1

"What Do You Say?"

People whose native language is English traditionally feel that gratitude is a good thing, that "the least they can do" for people who help them, give them presents, or do them favours is to thank them. To begin with, they usually have the habit of saying "thank you" drummed into them at an early age. And linguistic custom requires them to produce "thank you" and "thanks" not only when they feel gratitude, but also when it is thought they should feel grateful even though they do not. Indeed, they often feel obliged to say "thanks" in situations where gratitude is irrelevant.

This constant reiteration of "thank you" seems very odd to foreigners — even to other Europeans. The Spanish become suspicious if, translating English mannerisms directly into Spanish, an Anglo-Saxon keeps saying "thank you" to them: the constant thanker looks, at best, insincere. His interlocutor may suspect that such exaggerated politeness hides ulterior motives, that attempts are being made, for example, to exert pressure or artificially to impress. Constant thanking can actually create distance between a foreigner and a Spaniard. Another idiosyncrasy that is judged strange by non-Anglo-Saxons is the automatic production of "I'm sorry." An Englishman, according to the French, is someone who is jostled and apologizes, who says "I'm sorry" when somebody else steps on his toe.

Polite native speakers of English who commonly mix with others like themselves may say "thank you" a hundred times or more every day. Most of those occasions involve little or no grateful emotion. It is true, of course, that lots of English people fail to say "thank you" when they should; but the convention remains strong. In fact, precisely when people feel, as they increasingly do in our day, that mannerly behaviour in general is on the way out, as they become less and less willing to enact the previously ordained formalities that constitute politeness, the few rules that do remain take on unprecedented force. "Say 'thank you'" is one of these. You ignore this example of "the last few rules that remain" either because you are indifferent to whether you associate with others or not, or because you wish consciously to break with aspects of your own culture. Actual premeditated rudeness, of course, is utterly different: it breaks a rule but depends upon that rule being clear and in force. It is a strategy that relies on total understanding between the two sides, on agreement upon ends and means. "Insolence" is literally "what is unaccustomed" (from Latin solere, "be used to"). The unaccustomed is recognizable as such only by those who are well schooled in the widely accepted customary: in what is, and therefore what is not, "done."

Thanking, in English, is like greeting, apologizing, and politely requesting in that it is achieved by means of what linguists call "conversational routines." These include conventional phrases, iron-clad in their invariability, commonly said in a preordained order, and often hard to account for through traditional grammar. "Thank you" means "I — or we — thank you": "thank" is a verb spoken without its subject. The further abbreviation, "Thanks," stands for something like "I offer you my thanks." "No, thanks" is an expression that appears to have arrived during the late-nineteenth century. Mrs. Humphry announces in 1897 that "'No, I thank you,' is a form of words no longer heard in good society, having some time since been replaced by: 'No, thanks.'" The word had become a noun — in the plural.

These words and other routines like them are learned as phrases, or references to phrases, even when the original expressions are unknown to their speakers. As spoken phrases, they often remain unbreakable chunks of words, so much so that they have each become more like one word than a phrase. "How do you do?" seems to be a question, but the speaker really does not require — or even want — an account of how the other is doing. The equally fixed response is to repeat "How do you do?": the two parties have simply and formally assured each other that they belong to the group of those who can be expected to be polite. They are doing what is customary, not "insolent," and correct. Other conventional greeting and parting rituals involve saying "Good morning," "Good evening," "Good night," and "Good-bye," or "Bye-bye," the original and literal meaning of which is "God be with ye." "Please," tied as it is to a request, is less common than "thank you" but may be even more rigorously required. It means "If you please," which sounds archaic nowadays. The whole phrase may therefore, when found, and especially with a strong stress on the first word, be sarcastic: "If you please." For "please" we would now say (but we do not), "If it would please you, or at least not inconvenience or trouble you," and the idea includes "It would certainly please me."

The routine phrase "thank you" is far more difficult to account for than "please." Its meaning is so involved and complicated, indeed, that this book-length treatment of the idea will not exhaust its complexity. For example, nobody is supposed to do a kindness or give a present in order to receive thanks. We are very likely to be enraged, however, if thanks are not forthcoming. Gratitude — we feel — ought to be felt and must be expressed. Yet a person owed thanks often feels constrained to protest that the debtor owes nothing. "Not at all," he or she will protest. "It was nothing." What meets the eye, when we talk of thanks, is merely the tip of an iceberg.

The first paradox, however, because it affects us earliest, is the fact that being grateful is apparently not natural at all — yet evolutionary science speaks of gratitude in terms of genetic adaptation. We shall look at the second proposition later. One proof of the first may be found in the real difficulty young children undergo in grasping the concept of gratitude. Parents spend years and years demanding from their offspring the saying of "thank you." Children who have been brought up to say these words do not manage to produce them spontaneously until sometime between the ages of four and six. In our culture thanking is believed to be, for most children, the very last of the basic social graces they acquire. The first unprompted "thank you" is momentous enough to count as a kind of initiation into a new level of human consciousness — into distance and therefore perspective, into intentionality, understanding, recognition, deliberate relationship, and memory. After all, when a creature has a need, it suffers until the need is filled. When satisfaction arrives, nothing is more natural than pure relief. There is no need to think of anything else, no necessity that one should turn to one's benefactor and display gratitude.

Children have to be "brought up" to say they are grateful. The verb is passive: they are brought, they do not bring themselves. And they move "up," to a higher level. The following is a conversation recorded by social scientists who were observing how parents perform the duty of up-bringing in the matter of thanking.

FATHER: Whaddya say to Susan? Say "thank you" to Susan.

CHILD: [mumbles]

FATHER: Say "thank you" to Susan.

ASSISTANT: That's all right...

FATHER: Richard, I want you to say "thank you."

CHILD: No.

FATHER: Richard, that's not nice.

The parents of twenty-two middle-class children, eleven boys and eleven girls, had agreed to participate with their offspring in a study of "parent-child interaction." Parents did not realize that the point of the study was in fact what methods they employed and how hard they tried to teach their children to say "Hi," "Thanks," and "Good-bye." The "assistant" was in the know about the real purpose of the investigation. Gratitude is notoriously difficult to produce under laboratory conditions. This particular experiment was comparatively benign and successful; it did not aim too high. Indeed, it was about the learning of politeness formulae, and not about actual gratitude at all.

Each family was videotaped for thirty minutes while the parents and child played together, thinking that this was the point of the exercise. The real experiment began when the assistant appeared at the end of the session and gave the child a toy. The assistant spoke from a script. She turned to the child and said, "Hi, I'm [assistant's name]. Hi, [child's name]." There was a pause to see how the child responded, and what the parents said if there was no answering "Hi!" Then the assistant said, "Here's a gift for you for today's visit." [Pause.] Would the child say "thank you"? Later, there was a "good-bye" and a pause. The results of the experiment were then tabulated.

These children spontaneously said "hi" 27 percent of the time, "good-bye" 25 percent of the time, and "thanks" only 7 percent of the time. Parents prompted 28 percent for "hi," 33 percent for "good-bye," and 51 percent for "thanks." The experiment went on to analyze the efficacy of fathers as opposed to mothers in these reminding sessions. Parents not only prompt their children, but act as models of polite behaviour. During the periods of play, the conduct of the parents themselves was monitored. Mothers were much politer than fathers, spontaneously saying "thank you" 50 percent of the time, while fathers said it only 18 percent of the time. Insistence on their children's polite behaviour was especially important to these parents (knowing as they did that they were being experimented upon for interaction with their children). That their children should say "thank you" was of particular concern, partly because the children already said "hi" and "bye-bye" often, without prompting. The sociologists were of the opinion that since middle-class parents treat their children "permissively," parents in other social classes might make even stronger demands for routine politeness.

Children learn "hi" and "bye-bye" much earlier than they learn "thanks." One reason is that "hi" and "bye-bye" are said in response to other people producing these words first, whereas "thanks," with no prompt, has to come out of the child's own head: there is normally no verbal cue for it. The greeting formulae correspond to the physical facts of meeting and parting, with other people joining in. But thanking in no way resembles receiving, so copying cannot produce the correct response. Furthermore, one is expected to say "thank you" even if no gratitude is felt. It is hard to remember to "be nice," to remember when to carry out the routine — and to do it immediately. One might remember when it is too late.

MOTHER: Bye-bye. Thank you, Susan. [Assistant leaves.]

CHILD: Thank you for my ... for my toy. [To closed door]

MOTHER: Yes. Thank you for the toy. That was nice of you to thank her. Maybe if you see her again you can tell her in person.

Here, the mother says the words she hopes her child will reproduce on appropriate occasions. The child obediently complies, but says the words too late, and her mother points out the important fact that the whole point of thanking is the other person. Now the child will have to remember not only to say "thank you" but to say it later on, to the "assistant," even when the toy is no longer in her arms to remind her of what happened earlier. Learning to say "thank you" is a complex exercise in remembering.

Another reason why "hi" and "bye-bye" are learned long before "thanks" is the custom of making physical gestures to accompany the words, such as hand-waving — so easy for a child to do, so charming, and so exciting for adults to enact, to witness, and to repeat. "Thanks," on the other hand, is usually triggered in childhood not by gestures but by objects — the arrival of things asked for or given. The most useful setting of all for learning "please" and "thank you" is the dinner table, which is a kind of stage for the daily rehearsing of social interaction. Everybody is interested in food. Eating and drinking are done mostly in sharing groups, and this interaction entails asking for things, responding by passing things, and receiving them — with thanks, if the company agrees to insist on the thanking. It quickly becomes obvious that you must say "please" or you probably won't get what you want. And now that you have what you want, either remember the obliging attentions of the dinner companion who gave it to you and thank him, or annoy him by your failure so that he may be harder to persuade another time. At the table, the activities of giving and receiving occur in rapid succession: concrete experience, and repetition both constant and immediate, make for effective learning. Children in our culture learn manners at the dining table, and not manners only. It is believed that falling away from the cultural custom of eating with others at table three times a day can cause backwardness in all of a child's speaking skills.

According to a traditional English custom (one observed in my own British family when I was a child), the business of giving and receiving is provided with its own word, to be said to a child before it can even talk. "Ta," says the adult, giving something to a child or asking for something to be given. "Ta," after "Ma" and "Pa," is among the earliest words learned. It means "we are giving and taking": this is a scenario, a human drama in which both parties are engaged. Later on, the word can be used for either "Please give" or "I have received": one word, but two different actions. The idea of saying a special word when requesting has been introduced. Later on it will be replaced by "please," and at that moment "ta" is understood to mean only the satisfaction of receiving, and the meaning "please" falls away. "Ta" now becomes a simple form of "thank you," to be said before the child can pronounce that difficult series of sounds. Adults prompting for "ta" say the word loudly and clearly, with an intonation requesting repetition of the word, or the action, by the child. A different intonation expresses satisfaction when the word and the action are complete. Adults hold out a hand to proffer an object and also to receive one: the sign supports the production of the word, doubles it, and accompanies it.

Giving and receiving, then, before the child can talk, are a basis of interaction. With "ta" the child begins to give and not only to take. With saying "ta" on taking, an introduction has been made to thanking. This extremely early and intense socializing occurs because of the importance placed in Anglo-Saxon culture upon saying "please" and "thank you." A study in England in 1988 asked parents to draw up a list of what was thought most desirable in children's manners learned at table. "Please" and "thank you" appeared at the top of the list. Farther down came the correct use of tableware; not bringing books and toys to table; refraining from making a noise at table; and asking permission before leaving.

"Say 'thank you'!" parents cry over and over again. "Say" introduces the correct phrase in this and other cases of teaching polite formulae. "Say" is like a flag, introducing the words of the ritual. Children learn what they have to say as though it were a kind of spell, before they know what it means. They come to recognize that this scene is like a previously encountered scene — even though it may involve another place, different gifts, not the same people. And then they must produce the right words. Eventually, when they have matured and been further educated, they will come to be able to feel the emotion that the words express. The words come first, the feelings later.

When parents are aware that "Say 'thank you'!" has been said enough, and their own modelling of the phrase has been witnessed a sufficient number of times, they begin to prompt without supplying the words required: "What do you say?" they typically ask. The time has come, they warn the child. Do you recognize the situation? Do you remember what the script demands? To elicit "please," the question asked is often "What's the magic word?" — that is, the button to press in order to get what is wanted. The final moment — the triumph and the initiation — comes when the child is given something and says "thank you" without being reminded to do so. Parents do well to notice this event, for which they have worked so hard: it marks a whole new stage in a child's development. Later still, the child will recognize that a kindness that does not involve an object given also warrants thanks. Adults may eventually learn that something as apparently "normal" and to be taken for granted as another person's attention to us in times of affliction might be worth more gratitude than almost any present.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Gift of Thanks"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Margaret Visser.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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