A posh name for purposeless words

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Phatic.

Why?

This is why. Good word for us to know, thank you.

^I totally just read that article a couple days ago. I ALMOST made a post about the "what's up?" "how's it going?" exchange. It just sounds weird to me. I gotta think that SOME NT people will agree that it sounds a little weird if the person doesn't give an answer before asking. Like, I always try to say "good, you?" or something like that. Also, the question/question exchange seems a little less strange for people who know each other, but what about if it's a stranger on the street? Can you still do that, or is answering the question a better way to answer?

I'm really not so bad at this stuff usually, but this one's a little.. Idunno. D:

I kinda prefer the military's "Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening Sir/Mam" but I only seem to automatically think of it with only officers in uniform. I like it better though because it's not a question, you greeted them, acknowledged their presence and even wished them a good day.

What I don't get is like in facebook when you ask how someone's been doing (because you haven't seen them in 20 years or something) and they respond with...doing pretty good. I'm like no, I want to know if you are married, have kids, where you work, etc. I want a biography and I don't want to ask specific questions since I don't know anything about your life right now to the point where I don't know if any of those are bad questions to ask. Someone going through a divorce probably doesn't want to be asked if they are married. I also noticed if you haven't seen them in years, they really don't expect you to send messages back and forth about how y'all have been. Like that's only reserved for face to face meetings with that seriously uncomfortable moment of you knowing they are just trying to make you feel inadequate.

I prefer the term "bull****", but that's me.

It's a great strategy for staying sane, too. Well, not downplaying it; but making fun of it. Sometimes, you just have so many little things happen to you that you feel like you must be living in a sitcom or something, so you can't help but provide the laugh track.

Dyspraxic people may agree with me: Sometimes, life just gets slapstick.

The words may seem purposeless to us, because they often don't express the sentiments the words mean (ie. some say "how are you" without caring anyway), but it does have a purpose, namely to connect people.

It's funny how this is kind of similar to when NTs call our stimming "purposeless movements", while it to us certainly does have a purpose, namely to deal with stressing situations, to relax, to express a certain feeling etc.

Maybe smalltalk is to NTs what stimming is to people on the spectrum?

Social Lubricant. The only way to give the wrong phatic response is to imbue meaning into it. It is a conditioned response to a stimulus. If you are thinking about what it means, you are putting the wrong meaning in it. You make acknowledgement of other human beings you come in contact with as a way of signaling to them that you are paying attention to their presence as a mutual signaling of the trust we place in each other with our lives as we live out our society. I want to walk across this street that people drive cars on so I check to make sure I get acknowledgement from the driver of the car at the corner that they are not going to run me over when I step off the curb.

So we say How are you? Not because we specifically want to know how are you doing RIGHT NOW, but as a tacit acknowledgement that in a general sense we do care that they feel acknowledged. That's the way I understand it.

Your street metaphor makes me think of it this way: regular conversation is the traffic, and phatic words are the street signs and traffic lights that regulate how many and how fast words can go.

I just read the "phatic" article and think it is completely asinine!

Perhaps I am anti-phatic. If you don't intend to convey any information or make a query for the purpose of gaining information, keep your big mouth shut.

We already have a word for the aforementioned social purposes; "hello". So if somebody passes me and says, "hey dood, how's it goin?" I say "hello".