The next time someone accuses you of interrupting, you might want to explain that you are not being rude: You’re actually engaging in “high-involvement cooperative overlapping.”
Cooperative overlapping — talking as another person continues to speak — is typical of Jewish conversational style, according to linguist Deborah Tannen, and can be a way of showing interest and appreciation.
Tannen had a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 nodding and laughing with recognition as she delineated typically Jewish patterns of conversation during a recent lecture on Jewish conversational style at Georgetown University.
Tannen, 54, is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and author of many scholarly and popular works, including the best-selling “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” and “That’s Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships.”
Jewish conversational style is not a precise term. Not all Jews exhibit its characteristic features and not all people who exhibit them are Jewish, according to Tannen. But the pattern of conversation found among many Jews from New York and its environs, especially those of Eastern European origin, differs in significant ways from that of most non-Jewish Americans from the South, Midwest and West.
In an interview prior to her talk, Tannen discussed her analysis of Jewish-style conversation. Along with cooperative overlap, she said Jewish-style conversational patterns include a “fast rate of speech, the avoidance of inter-turn pauses and faster turn-taking among speakers.”
In a conversation among Jews, participants find the simultaneous talk and quick turn-taking unremarkable; they interpret silences and pauses as evidence of lack of rapport and/or interest.
But those not accustomed to that style, according to Tannen, may see such active listening behaviors as rudeness, verbal hogging and lack of interest in the speaker. The very characteristics that promote good conversation among the in-group can create discomfort or hostility among mixed groups.
Beyond that, people make judgments about the personality of individuals based on conversational style. According to Tannen, negative stereotypes of New York Jews as pushy may be the result of clashing linguistic patterns rather than character flaws.
Different conversational styles of couples, where one person is Jewish and the other is not, may contribute to the initial attraction, Tannen said. Someone quieter may seem mysterious and wise, while somebody more talkative can seem articulate and smart. But over time, the differences in style, particularly in close relationships, can be difficult. “You think you had good intentions, and they think you had bad ones,” she said.
Other features of Jewish conversational style include a preference for personal topics, abrupt shifts of topics, unhesitating introduction of new topics and persistence in reintroducing a topic if others don’t immediately pick up on it.
Jews also tend to tell more stories in their conversations, often in rounds; dramatize the point of a story instead of putting it into words; and focus on the emotional experience of it.
People whose regional and ethnic background promotes a different way of conversing may not “get the point” of these rounds of story-sharing with no real plot, she said. They also may find the expectation of personal revelation unnervingly intrusive.
Tannen believes the sound of Jewish-style talk — pitch shifts, changes in loudness, exaggerated voice quality and accent — can signal concern and empathy as well as reinforcing a shared ethnic background among Jews. Or they may put off people more used to a restrained, less expressive way of speaking.
As participants milled around or were leaving following the talk, clusters of people analyzed their own talk.
“There were four of us chatting together and we started laughing,” said Julie Epstein, the coordinator for Jewish graduate student programming at Georgetown. “We suddenly saw just how much we were using Jewish conversational style.”
I didn’t think it was ethnic so much as regional. Robert Altman’s midwestern masterpiece tableau A WEDDING, where an Italian family marries into midwestern Episcopaleans with Carol Burnett’s wild turn and Johnny Carson’s chief comedy writer Pat McCormick doing some riotous yet subtle facial comedy in reaction shots springs to mind as an example of “Overlapping dialogue” and small group gab over drinks and canapes.
In fact all of Altman’s movies, especially NASHVILLE and THREE WOMEN were criticized for actors swallowing their lines or having characters overrun plot-advancing dialogue by the leads or stars. That was the intimate magic of Altman’s repertory actors’ improv style. Most of Altman’s movies were made, especially POPEYE shot on the island of Malta as the sailor’s SWEETHAVEN crony capitalist port town was a symphony of overlapping mumblings, grumblings, suppressed gripes and supplications to THE FOUNDER aka the reclusive if omniscient COMMODORE, or POPEYE’s Pappy.
One of Ray Walston’s greatest roles, stoked by Robin Williams’ total free rein to create on set from Altman’s outline from an earlier optioned script by Jules Feiffer who wrote dialogue for Dustin Hoffman who was the first envisioned POPEYE before Altman got the studio deal’s remains to do with what he wished.
The experimental playwrights and DIY theater troupes of the 1960’s, 70,s, 80’s and 1990’s in various regional hot-houses of indie theater, writer-directors like Murray Mednick, Thomas Babe, Ed Bullins, John Guare, David Rabe, Sam ShepardPatti Smith, Charles Gordone, Diane DiPrima and the Diggers, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), David Mamet and Albert Innuarato all featured overlapping dialogue to wondrous and often mytho-poetic effect.
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POPEYE, my all-time favorite role for Robin Williams. He nailed it. I had the opportunity to tell him that I thought his performance in that movie was not given the accolades he deserved. Later a friend of mine, who I related my encounter and conversation with involving Robin in NYC, saw Robin being interviewed by Charlie Rose. Rose asked Williams which movie, if any, he thought he starred in didn’t get the appreciation he deserved. He paused, thought about it, and then said, “Popeye”!
Oh please. How did this become cooperative overlapping as a Jewish trait instead of active listening which is recommended for everybody. I are a linguist and the academics are guilty of a lot of stupidity in this department.
Are you suggesting that interrupting (nonsensically called “cooperative overlapping ” by Tannen) is the same as active listening? If so, it’s most certainly not.
You sound like you are unable to see that other people have other worldviews from yours. If you want to read more about it, one of Tannen’s books has a whole chapter on interrupting and that it means different things in different subcultures because the length of pause that indicates it’s the next person’s turn to talk varies wildly among groups — from a full two seconds among the Athabasca Indians, to a a negative length among New York Jews. I have a cousin with whom I have great and satisfying conversations — and we “talk a duet” — both talking and listening at the same time. It works for some people. You might think you are being polite, but someone with a different tradition might think you are being stand-offish.
Perhaps you’d like to read the comment I was commenting on and then re-read my comment – the content of which has absolutely nothing to do w/your sanctimonious pontificating reaction to what I said.
Active listening means listening to the other person speak, without interrupting them, and then reflecting back to them what you heard them say before going on to make your own contribution to the discussion. It’s a particular technique used in formal dialogue settings as well as in conversation in order to facilitate trust and understanding. It’s the exact opposite of overlapping conversation. (I’m a New York City Jew who has been trained in active listening. I have also read Tannen’s work. I do find it fascinating that despite Tannen’s work showing that overlapping conversation tends to be specific to NYC, many people insist that it’s particularly Jewish.)
I think I get why non-Jewish non-New-Yorkers don’t get it but yeah, you have to REALLY not get it to not understand that it’s not just mindless interrupting. There’s a pretty high level of attention and engagement that’s required to engage in this “cooperative overlapping” style.
This is why those of us who expect to interact this way think people who don’t get it are bored or otherwise not interested–we know that we’re really excited and focused if we’re acting that way. So if someone isn’t acting that way then our reflex is that that person just isn’t interested in paying attention to the conversation.
“I are a linguist”
lel
As a foreigner living in Hungary for fifteen years, this all sounds VERY familiar. Over the years, I learned to accept this as another cultural difference (I’m from Florida), but with no small amount of frustration. This is especially true as a foreign speaker of Hungarian. Thank you for the phrase “high-involvement cooperative overlapping”! 🙂
The college I went to had a very high percentage of international students, and a very large chunk of the international students were Slavs. I spent a good part of college where the people I’d hang out with were me, my best friend who was also an Ashkenazi Jew, a ton of international students. Maybe this is why we found the international students a lot easier to deal with–maybe they were the most reflexively receptive to the way we expected to interact with people. 🙂
Oh it’s ethnic for sure. It’s also what you grew up hearing from a very young age. My parents were German immigrants. All spoke English, and no one ever completed a sentence during the Friday night poker game. “Ach, are you crazy?” was a very common phrase. So here I am a Midwest Ohio girl often being accused to being a New Yorker. :o) I’m too loud; I interrupt and I now feel validated. Great article! Thanks!
Enjoyed this article. Very interesting and informative. Explains a good number of things to me.
Can we call it what it is without making it a funny and trite thing? It is trauma. It is a nervous system that doesn’t know how to pause or settle. It is the affect of generational inheritance of the holocaust (why it’s primarily Eastern European Jews) and also New York City, who’s rhythm is too fast to allow pausing (do to lack of nature and speed of city life). Jews like to joke about trauma, but it also needs a serious look and some good body-based therapy. Lest we miss the opportunity to heal something that doesn’t need to be passed down to the next generation.
I totally agree, even though I am not American, but I am Jewish en post-shoah generation.
I have this conversational style. I was almost born with it and it comes naturally to me.
There hasn’t been any trauma in my family for well over 100 years–they all came to America early.
I have an appreciation for this pattern of thinking as conveying maximum relevant information–bilaterally–quickly and efficiently in a multi-dimensional method for added efficiency and effect
Logically speaking, it constitutes a technological advance in face-to-face communication–entirely unsurprising that this should spring from the world’s most literate and intelligent people.
The effects of trauma have been shown to be passed down for generations. There are studies in epigenetics that demonstrate how trauma that physically or emotionally affects one individual can alter her genetic makeup in such a way that the trauma is physically inherited (e.g., mouse studies in which the offspring of a traumatized mouse exhibited high anxiety in anticipation of a repetition of a trauma that the mother actually experienced, despite having been reared away from the mother and not experiencing that trauma themselves). You need to broaden your understanding of the long arc of trauma’s affects on populations.
Also, to suggest that no one in your family has experienced trauma because they have lived in the U.S. for a few generations is naive. I was verbally and physically assaulted for being a Jew by other children in the late 1960s. My mother experienced antisemitism in college in the 1940s. Just knowing from a young age that there are people who hate you enough to kill you for simply existing is traumatic. Going back to the twentieth century, Jews in the U.S. were banned from certain jobs, kept out of many social organizations and hotels, and more. Before WWII there were pro-Nazi rallies in this country. In places like NYC. You don’t need violent pogroms or concentration camps to be traumatized. (If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend viewing the film “Gentlemen’s Agreement” for a revealing look at the almost-subtle antisemitism rampant in the post-war U.S.)
Fascinating. I think inherited trauma plays a potentially huge role in defining us. Excellent post.
Resending an article from 2000? On second thought, anything by Deborah Tannen is worth republishing.
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I’m not particularly interested in letting the white people tell me how I’m supposed to be. I mean sure, it’s worth recognizing that not everyone is going to respond well to it; if you’re in NYC it’s bled into the culture enough that even non-Jews will probably get what you’re doing…I had a rude awakening moving to DC. But there’s a difference between “be conscious of yourself at work and try to not unwittingly sabotage yourself” and “beat it out of yourself because it’s WRONG and there’s something WRONG with you if you do this”
We are hardly the first nor the last minority group to have to learn that the way we act amongst each other and other people who get it is necessarily going to be different than how we act around people who just don’t get it. I’m not going to act ashamed of being my grandfather’s grandchild–the man who ran away from home when he was 16 because he saw the writing on the wall about Hitler when his parents didn’t and basically just said “Fuck this, I’m getting the fuck out while I still can.”
I think of Howard Hawks’ direction of “His Girl Frday” (1940) and “The Thing (from Another World)” (1951) with pretty much the same kind of ‘overlapping dialogue.’ The original play, “The Front Page” that “His Girl Friday” was reworked from, was written by Ben Hecht, but I don’t think Hecht had any input beyond that. I don’t know Hawks’ background, nor am I that familiar with his other films where the idea may or may not have been applied.
Hawks really really hated Jewish people, Lauren Bacall is my source…she was terrified of him.
I heard that conversational mode called “the New York interruptive style.” But then what do I know since I come from the pipik of the Middle West and I worked in NYC, ok, ok, da Bronx, for only four years and had to marry a Jew to get any of it. I can keep up now, my side of the conversation. What else can I tell you.
As Tannen points out, this is more specifically a New York, Ashkenazi style. When my mom, who had lived in New York until her late 90s, had to move to Minnesota we had her visit the Jewish Community Center there. She had been quite active in the JCC before she moved, but when I asked her how she liked her first few visits there, she confided in me “I don’t think these people are really Jewish.”
The Torah is filled with Jews arguing. We built the Talmud on dialectics. The word ‘Israel’ means ‘to struggle with G-d,’ and the branches of contemporary Judaism are based on how each confronts the struggle between conformity and argument.
When infants’ brains grow through dialog, synapses multiply exponentially. In the healthiest of these modes, the skill of Jewish rapid-fire dialog comes from lifetimes of questions-and-answer learning, rather than brains being stunted by ‘Because God Made it that way.’ Unfortunately, the worst of this Jewish quality devolves into narcissism. The difference is by practicing active listening.
From the Nature/Nurture perspective, I love that, of all ethnic groups, Michito chose to liken us to an Italian family. Our family lived in Italy for two years; it felt like my mystical home, and I found my deep emotions validated years later by a New York Times article saying that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more closely related to Northern Italians than to any other ethnic group.
I think it’s a sign of intelligent listening and engagement. Who likes to sit as a victim, held hostage by another person’s monologue that goes on and on, without the opportunity to ask questions or speak about the ideas or story being told? Being accused of interrupting is frustrating for the person who is expected to sit on their hands and keep their mouth shut as the speaker drones on and on, not even noticing you got their point five minutes ago!