In my sociolinguistics class I have learned that Finnish people, among other cultures, can stop talking about something dead in the middle of a conversation and then pick up the thread without introduction a day later. This pickled my fancy. It is how I communicate with some of my friends digitally, and I really like these asynchronous conversations. You just talk when you have something to say, and you don't have to obligatorily keep up a conversation and plug it with comments about the weather or describing people walking by. Then again I have always been notoriously bad at small talk. I think I'd subscribe to the Carlos Ruiz Zafón view that "humans aren't descended from monkeys, they come from parrots."
Also, starting conversations with some random statement or inquiry is so much more fun! I think David Byrne summarized it very adequately in Psycho Killer:
You start a conversation you can't even finish it.
You're talkin' a lot, but you're not sayin' anything.
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.
Say something once, why say it again?
It also ties in with my fondness for writer Don DeLillo. A lot of people criticise him for the way people talk in his books, that it is unnatural and that no real person will ever talk this way(!) I do not dispute this, even if these critics do go out of their way to pick four quotes out of a 600-page novel to prove their point. Quotes that are, of course, easily made to sound ridiculous when taken out of context like that. Anyway, there is some truth to it, but I would love for the universe to be more like a DeLillo novel. Where people can be awkwardly silent without actually being considered awkward, can launch into a difficult topic without being considered difficult, and can altogether do away with small talk. I image everyone would be carrying around a dusty paperback to turn to when conversation stalls. I would like that.
