In Catalunya Ràdio, the philosopher Marina Garcés reflects on the perverse side of the promise, which is a subject that has been troubling her for some time. The tone is relaxed and the eloquence, pedagogical. Garcés flees from erudition that intimidates without renouncing an argued radicality. Often, however, he ends sentences – or interrupts them – with a non-interrogative – “no?” – which distracts from the fluidity of his speech. What’s more: it seems that the responsibility to agree prematurely shifts to you and, in the pure spirit of contradiction, you feel like answering every “no?” with a “I don’t know. You will know”.
Those of us who, more or less, speak in the media need to know which wedges we don’t control and which colloquial vices we abuse, because we don’t always have the ability to realize them. In her first mandate, Ada Colau abused these “no?”. So much so, that other councilors in the Consistory were infected by it and it became a kind of almost ideological sign of identity (like when in the late 1970s we thought we were smarter if we repeated “that is” or “I want say” ad nauseum). The “no?”, however, is transversal.
Some time ago, a communication expert recommended to me that, in order to detect these colloquial eruptions, I should transcribe twenty lines of any spontaneous speech (that was not read or prepared). If I abused them, they would jump out at me so much that it would be easy for me to correct them. If he did this exercise, the journalist and doctor of communication Toni Aira, for example, would realize that he says “that is to say” even when the difference between what he says and what in theory “that is to say” is null· the.
After the contagion of “no?”, which sought more empathy with the interlocutor and invited an immediate understanding, I notice that the opposite recourse is becoming fashionable. I have heard it from experts in various subjects, who give classes or public outreach. Instead of “no?” by sprinkling, they place a “yes?” The writer and musician Ramon Gener does it, as if he wanted to demand the attention of interlocutors who might feel the temptation to – yes or no? – disconnect.
