Sometimes a slight pause precedes a meaningfully downbeat delivery of the last word.
The high today will be 14 . . . Bill.
Sometimes a just-more-than-slight pause acts like audible punctuation or a line break.
And that leaves the Yankees leading the ALCS
two games to one.
Bill.
Sometimes there is no discernible pause but the rising intonation catches your attention.
Traffic is moving well
with no accidents this morning, Bill?
But sometimes it all just runs together Bill so that it’s hard to tell when the weather/sports/traffic specialist has stopped talking Bill and is trying to hand the baton back to the morning-show host without any (shudder) dead air Bill because everyone speeds up on their delivery of the repetitive bits of their patter and the host’s name just gets tacked on at the end of it without any pause or intonation change Bill.
Remarkably, Bill usually responds to these varied cues pretty smartly, although this listener has had an anxious moment or two, wondering whether Bill heard the Bill.
Since Covid, our morning guy has been working from home; as near as I can tell, his colleagues in communication have now returned to the downtown radio station. If they were all broadcasting from the same room, the hand-offs would be both more easy and less risky. (No, even given the elegance of the more/less parallel construction, that doesn’t sound right. Easier and unriskier? Nope. No wonder English is so hard to learn.) They’d be easier, see, because the host could get a visual clue as well as an aural one. They’d be less risky, see, because if the hand-off-er saw that the hand-off-ee hadn’t quite kept up and was doom-scrolling or staring off into space, they could continue speaking to cover the lapse.
Environments where talkers can’t see each other often develop protocols for clean hand-offs. The canonical Over of two-way radio communication comes to mind, although it seems that it’s used more in the movies than in real life.
It is neither required, nor necessary for brief, clear, and concise ATC [air traffic control] to pilot communications on VHF and UHF when standard phraseology is used and the essential elements of a typical transmission are all present.
For example, “N123SM taxi Runway 16 via Alpha” is complete. There’s nothing else to say, nothing more expected. As soon as the controller unkeys their mic it is obvious that the pilot should now respond. The word “over” is simply unnecessary.
Where it becomes necessary, (and is expected) is when communication becomes lengthy, non-standard, or transmission quality is low. A perfect example is a long- range, mid-ocean phone patch via HF radio. Reception may be weak and fuzzy, and you may have a lot more to say. You may even unkey the mic momentarily to take a quick breath before continuing on. It is important that the receiver understand when you have finished so as to not step on you with a response before you have passed all the information along. This is when the term becomes useful.
All right then. But even if we are not usually conversing via a long-range, mid-ocean phone patch susceptible to fuzziness–yea, verily, even if we are conversing face to face–we can find ourselves in communication that is lengthy or non-standard. We might even unkey the mic momentarily to take a quick breath before continuing, without in any way meaning to hand off the talking stick. So that the receiver understands when we have finished [Ed’s note: and when we have NOT] so as to not step on us with a response before we have passed all the information along, some sort of hand-off term would be useful.
Don’t you think Bill.
Bill?
Oh, never mind. Over and out.
My friend Ralph Milton, a former radio announcer, tells me that announcer-training classes now teach students to add a rising intonation to the ends of their sentences. The standard practice of dropping one’s voice slightly at the end of a sentence leads to the final words disappearing into background noise. However, the rising intonation usually signifies a question. Which leads to momentous news being presented as a question: “World War III has just been declared? Bill? Is anyone still alive, Bill?”
Jim T – Oh dear, that’s funny-not-funny, isn’t it? A quick perusal of Google shows that rising inflection is taught to second-language learners as a way to ask a question and just to signal doubt or uncertainty. But the psychology of “upspeak” says that it’s inviting reassurance while discouraging interruption (a longer and more-nuanced discourse here). I hadn’t thought about the broadcast problem of losing the end of sentences. Maybe they could ring a little bell.
I find it a frustration on most cell phone calls, and ALL FaceTime conversations! The overlapping of sentences, and the inevitable “ no, you go ahead” Was this a feature of land line phone conversation way back when? I think not? But?
Perhaps I need to include “over” in my phone conversations?
Alison – Hm. A good question. I don’t remember over-talking from landline calls, either. Maybe collectively we’ve gotten less patient with even small (apparent) delays or dead air? I remember the first time I came across the notion that the opposite of talking wasn’t listening: it was waiting. 🙂
Stat.
P. S. Sometimes they wait too long when you’ve finished talking (service reps, esp.) and you expect an answer: nothing. Then when you say — are you there? they talk over you and then stop to hear what you have said, etc., etc. It’s like trying walk when a person keeps tripping you.
Barbara – Hahaha. Yes, an excellent image. Interviews on TV follow different protocols: some allow time at the start for a thanks-for-having-me bit from the interviewee; some at the end; some not at all. Regulars know the drill, but the newbies/occasionals get talked over or are left hanging. You’d think whoever arranged the interview would brief them on the protocol.
Great discussion on the finer points of conversing, which, as you say, is easy in person. Except, of course, when we talk over each other! Maybe we are meant to clash, a vigorous approach to interaction. Eh, Bill?
Judith – Maybe! Keeping track of what someone else is saying while we’re talking might select for big brains. 🙂
With reference to Barbara’s point, CSRs are quite often looking at a menu on their screens for what to say next, thus an explicable delay.
At one time with the work of a team operating portable radios, the beginning as well as the end were important. To begin with we always numbered ourselves. If I was trying to communicate information to a team, and with me being team three, I would start the communication ‘one three’ meaning that I could be directing specific information to them, or am calling on only team one to respond with a ‘copy’ in response, rather than everyone ‘stepping’ on the precious airwaves acknowledging the information imparted.
Ken – There you go. I knew there would be other protocols in limited situations. I like that about directed messaging. “You – yes, you – tell me you got this. Everyone else pipe down.” Some organizations (the military comes to mind) have similar rules about responding to emails – you don’t respond if you’re copied, only if you’re a direct recipient. It drives some ex-military crazy when they start working with a bunch of (often-young) civilians who figure they have something to offer on every topic, or who are just trying to be polite by responding. (Which of us ever truly know another’s motivation?)
Hi Ken — but I’ve also had this kind of “conversation overlay” with my nephew over the years and other Millennials. It’s so clumsy and dissatisfying. They usually communicate by text. Emails have been abandoned for years. I feel like an old woman put on a iceberg and shoved out to sea. The last thing we seem to have in the Age of Communication is communication.
Isabel
We went to a Home Routes concert the other night. A 30-year-old man from Glasgow was the entertainer. Not only did he sing his own compositions, and with a definite Scottish brogue, but his voice trailed off on the last word of each line. Much was lost.
Now, Bill, as far as the Yankees-Guardians series, 2 games to one was several days ago. The Yankees are on their way to the World Series, Bill!
Tom
Tom – I wonder whether there’s some middle ground between swallowing the final word of a sentence (trailing off, as you say) and doing that upward-inflection. You’d think there’d be some way to punch-up the final word without changing pitch. As for the Yankees, Bill knows. Bill doesn’t like it.
I have the impression but cannot prove it that old land line phones allowed for “overlapping” when one speaker interrupted another, as in face-to-face communication, but that cell phones allow only one-way traffic so that an interruption actually stops the communication coming from the first speaker. Strange echos happen with our phones, too, so that a speaker has the impression of having interrupted the other caller even when that is not so. Where’s Bill when we need him?
The upward inflection is typical of French, non? Being asked to change my English inflections might send me into my natal (or prenatal) French.
Laurna – This takes me back to school subjects I happily left behind more than 50 years ago, so I do not vouch for the correctness of what follows. Landlines and “modern” cellphones are both categorized as full duplex, in which both parties can transmit and receive simultaneously (the overlapping you mentioned). Walkie-talkies, which are push-to-talk radios, are half-duplex. The button that turns on the transmitter turns off the receiver, so if you’re talking, you can’t be listening. As for the upward inflection in French, that’s my impression too. I think English is a relatively uninflected language.
Thank you for the link that has made sense of my confidence in my senses. Although a grasp of the entire article would require assiduous study, it gives me a handle on the changes taking place in the services available on our country road.
Laurna – 🙂 Maybe there’s a service business in bringing folks up to date – annually, maybe? It wouldn’t apply only to old people: lots of us missed crucial elements of things we need to understand the world around us, and an “update” could discreetly fill in necessary-but-missing background for many of us.