I was leaving a local taqueria last night when a skinny, middle-aged beggar with wild eyes accosted me on his way in.

"Sammich!" He blurted, eyes bulging, palm out.

I gave him my standard "sorry," pressing past.

"Sorry??" he raged, with righteous indignation. 

Apparently I'd offended him. 

Anyone living in the city has likely encountered beggars reprimanding them for saying "sorry."  Part of the problem for them seems to be the naked cynicism of using "sorry" for "sod off" when a simple "no" would do. 

Or would it? 

When I was teaching abroad a complaint I heard ad nauseam was that Americans were insincere.  As proof my students always said we Americans (and particularly waitresses and shop clerks) ask "How are you?" when we don't really give a rat's ass how you are and certainly don't want you to tell us.  It's a figure of speech, of course, but my students seemed to prefer (or to think they preferred) that we be genuinely enthralled by their inner lives if we are to inquire about them at all. 

(In Hungarian, with which I have some familiarity, the question "hogy vagy?" /"how are you?"/ which usually accompanies a "hello" is, in theory at least, a "real question" — that is, you can answer "I am well" but you can also launch right into a litany of complaints if you so choose.  In theory you could do the same in English.  In practice, however, in both Hungarian and English it's more or less rhetorical, and for obvious reasons.)

Of course, every language has its figures of speech meant to ease social friction and grease the wheels of commerce.  Language itself is both edifice and artifice — so much so that it actually takes great skill and practice to communicate sincerity through it.  Still, we expect strangers not merely to respect but also to be riveted by us.  This is our sitcom, you just appear in an episode.  Briefly.  Fawn or say something funny and then get the fuck out of my way, right?

In a culture like ours of such relentless self-regard, it's not enough for strangers to be merely polite, they must be prostrate.  As deeply attentive to our every mood swing as we ourselves are oblivious to theirs. When everybody feels this way, well, astute students of social discourse will see a conundrum. 

Personally, I'm all for polite disinterest.  It's preferable to rude disregard, anyway.  And those two seem to be the extent of our choices in reality.  I don't need absolute sincerity and earnest disclosure with my morning cup of coffee.  I not only understand what's going on when my barista asks me "how're you doing?" I appreciate it.  And I don't abuse it by misconstruing it.  Why ruin something as simple and benign as our salutatory banter?

We simply cannot be on intimate terms with everyone.  Nor, on reflection, would we want to be.  And yet, society must function.  And a civil society sees that the core of respect is not personal intimacy, it's human empathy.  Next time you're tempted to hit on the cute kid behind the counter, ask yourself, "if I were eighteen and working a double shift at Starbucks, would I want every middle-aged latte-guzzling Lothario leering and lunging over the bar at me?"  I think — I hope, I pray — you can guess the answer.

But there's no harm in harmless banter, through which the fantasy that that eighteen year-old barista is actually flirting with you can be sustained indefinitely with never a need to get full-on skeevy. 

Again, we know the drill.  But it would probably do us all some good to take a course or two in old-school elocution, if only to increase consciousness of the varieties of speech we encounter in the world. I say consciousness because we obviously understand implicitly that the way we speak in different contexts is anything but uniform.  

We understand that in certain contexts — political speeches come to mind — a manner of speaking that would ring utterly insincere in any other setting has the power to inspire us.  Speechifying involves not only a particular cadence and volume, but a whole lexicon of phrases that ring false in intimate conversation.  Were we to start speechifying at a friend in a moment of personal crisis, it would seem not just bizarre, but hurtful. 

The study of poetry in, say, Matthew Arnold's time served a similar function of reinforcing an implicit understanding of language's multiple registers. The study of poetry today (all but nonexistent in K-12 and relegated to a specialization thereafter) wouldn't serve the purpose all that well anyway, because we have grown to identify poetry, and writing and art in general, as fundamentally an expression of self, when, in fact, all great art stems, as the great Czech writer (and avid gardener) Karel Čapek once said, from a "mania... not to express myself, but to express things."

Point being, it's not always all about you, you know.

I was just trying to be polite.  But I guess you can't really expect a great deal of nuance from a guy who goes around screaming "sammich!" at strangers.  I'm not sorry I said "sorry", but maybe I should have said "where???" and ducked instead.