Terry Prone: Can we humbly ask that you stop telling us you don’t do small talk?

Actor Kevin Spacey was “humbled” by the outcome of his sexual abuse trial in London. Speaking outside Southwark Crown Court, was he really admitting to having his reputation denigrated and damaged?

He stood outside the court, looking relieved, and delivered a neatly prepared statement without reading from a script. Kevin Spacey even looked behind him at one point to make sure that named members of his legal team got credit for the work they had done. In addition, he specifically thanked the security and other staff inside the court for the care they had taken of him during the course of his trial. He was clear and decisive. When he said he wasn’t going to say anything more, it didn’t matter how many questions were shouted at him by the bank of journalists he was leaving behind him. Not one of them was going to be answered. It was elegant and effective. With one exception.

That exception was the point where he announced that he was humbled. Here’s a man who for more than a decade was in charge of the Old Vic Theatre, which stages the works of the great English dramatists. Here’s a man who himself has played many of the great roles in that corpus, including Richard III.

But here’s a man who joins generations of speakers in misusing the verb “to humble.” If you say you are humbled by something, it means you are denigrated, damaged, reduced from a higher state to a lower state. People say it all the time when they’re having honorary degrees conferred on them, when what they actually should say is “I humbly accept this honour” which simultaneously establishes their gratitude and their sense that the world may hold a few other folk who might be even more deserving of awards than they are. But you don’t announce that you’re humbled, since it sends a loud message that you were pretty arrogant before this happened. “Humble” and ‘humbled’ aren’t the same thing, as Uriah Heep could testify if he wasn’t so occupied wringing his hands.

Power of language

Inside the court, Spacey’s language was odd. Take the rebarbative attribution of motive to at least one of his accusers, when he suggested that they wanted “money, money, and more money.” But nothing inside the court equaled the miscommunication achieved by him being humbled. By the use of that one word, he managed to add to the list of statements celebs should never make. They’re statements the rest of us should never make, either, but let’s start with the one frequently utilised by the reasonably famous.

“I’m not the kind of person who...” This one crept up on us over the last few years, as people started to circuitously self-define by stating “I’m not the kind of person who beats their wife,” “I’m not the kind of person who eats curry”, and “I’m not the kind of person who drives an SUV”.

Instead of saving themselves and their listeners time and going “I don’t drive an SUV or eat curry and have never beaten my wife,” they go the scenic route.

The most egregious current example of this is an RSA radio ad, where a pompous male voice announces that he’s not the kind of person who likes sitting in a metal box. Ah ha, I hear you say, he doesn’t like being stuck in a car in a traffic jam. Then he goes on to tell us that he does like riding a motorbike. More power to him. Then, in a dramatic circularity, he works up to telling us that he’s not the kind of person who likes lying in a wooden box. Geddit? The wooden box is a coffin, and avoidance of same (as well as avoidance of direct speech) is why the voiceover artist maintains he doesn’t ride his bike at speed. 

By the time he’s done, you’d hate him so much you’d want to speed, using whatever vehicle a person like you uses.

The chances are good that the kind of person who is so irritating about being that kind of person is also the kind of person who says they can’t do small talk. This claim is always presented with a kind of virtuous regretfulness akin to saying “I’m not the kind of person who enjoys torturing small animals”. They’d really like to be obliging and kick a squirrel if you had one handy, and they’d genuinely want to be the kind of person who does small talk, but they’re too serious and their brain is too full of important stuff to engage in it.

The small talk one isn’t usually associated with celebs, because celebs have contexts and heavies which preclude the need to do small talk. It tends to occur more often in those who are confecting a brand for future use when the speaker is famous. They never realise what a dead giveaway it is or what it actually means. What it actually means is “I am such a self-absorbed bore, I can’t be bothered asking other people about themselves and finding them interesting.”

Nobody’s looking for opinions. Just attention. All you have to do, in any social setting, is ask the person in front of you questions. Simple questions. Like “How does that work?” And “Your name is Barbara? Barbara, like, not Barbie?” Asking people about their names is exceptionally productive.

Just last week, I met an executive with a name like Maria. It wasn’t Maria, but Maria will serve. But she was spelled Mariagh, which I’d never seen before, so I asked about it. All of her sisters, she explained, had names ending in A, and her mother, to ensure they looked Irish, added GH to each of them.

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If refusal to do small talk is indicative of self-absorption, an even more potent indicator is when someone claims not to be a people-pleaser. Recently meeting a woman I first encountered in college, I was surprised when she announced that she had given up being a people-pleaser. Since, even 50 years ago, this one was a vespine personification of nastiness — a tradition she fearlessly maintains to this day on social media — hearing the claim that she’d given up people-pleasing was a surprise. A surprise that gave rise to any number of revelations.

When asked why people-pleasing was such a vile habit, she said she wouldn’t be judgemental, which is up there with “I’m not a racist, but” as a lie and a confession, rolled up together, unbeknownst to the roller-upper.

She then went for the hat trick by telling me she knew how I felt. This is what complete morons say when sympathising with someone who has been bereaved, fired, evicted, or diagnosed with a cancer that’s going to painfully kill them within three weeks.

Claiming to know how someone else feels is a bit like when a politician says “I get it. I really get it,” thus proving they don’t. If they get it, it will show in their actions.

You don’t have to tell us you’re humbled by being the kind of person who knows how we feel. Nor should you.