Littell's Living Age/Volume 136/Issue 1756/The Vice of Talking Shop
THE VICE OF TALKING SHOP.
It is very wrong to talk shop. That is one of society's most venerated precepts, even if—not wholly unlike most venerated precepts, in higher codes of morality—it is one of the least obeyed. Not to know it is not to know the rudimentary "my duty towards my neighbor" of social religion. And to enforce it—as occasion may require, of course—must be the duty of every self-respecting diner-out. For if you fall among shop-talkers whose shop is not yours you may get thrown into the background. The predicament is serious; it is not only that you may be prevented from taking part in the conversation with your accustomed excellence, but that you may have to hold your tongue altogether; and, in spite of the many compliments paid to silence by the many sages who have wished to do all the talking themselves, people are apt to assume that when a man says nothing in company it is because he can find nothing to say. And at any rate no one likes to play the part of the mummy at an Egyptian banquet, to be the blank guest whose silence conveys a protest against the whole proceedings, and concerning whom the other guests must needs feel that the best they can do with him is to let him alone. He who finds himself in such a pass will no more doubt that it is a vice to talk shop than he would doubt that it is a vice not to pay one's debts if somebody else persevered in owing him an inconveniently large sum of money.
And yet there is something to be said on behalf of shop. The rule of society no doubt is that we should talk of what we do not know rather than of what we do know; still there are many men, and perhaps some women, who are absolutely unable to obey the rule — except negatively, by not talking of anything. Women who mix at all with the world readily acquire the knack of talking companionably of what they know nothing about—a great many women indeed seem less to acquire it than to have it as a birthright; obedience to the rule sits upon them as easily and as fitly as the furbelows and gauzes in which a man would find himself like a fly in a cobweb. Therefore women, even women with specialities, rarely talk shop. In fact, partly under the dread of those fatal adjectives "blue," "gushing," "strong-minded," and partly from a sort of mental prudery—one which has its good side but also its bad—which objects, as it were, to the real woman being too accurately scanned, they more usually shrink from any discussion of subjects in which they feel a close interest. But there is a large tale of men who never arrive at being able to talk on subjects about which they have neither information nor concern; and the question is, whether in their case it is not worth while to relax the stringency of the rule. Suppose a man's shop has so engrossed him that it really is the only thing he knows or cares about. He is not uneducated, perhaps not even narrow-minded, but his intellect is not of the much-embracing order, and his profession or his purpose has so absorbed his intellectual sympathies that, just as if he were some great artist, all he sees and learns gets somehow dovetailed into the one theme of his life. Whenever circumstances have led to a man's occupying his time and his thoughts in one especial manner with any sort of zeal, he will unconsciously acquire such a readiness in detecting everything that has the remotest affinity to his paramount topic that it can never be quite out of his memory. There will always be the temptation to get back to it—set him down where you will, some byway brings him back into the familiar highway. Cleverness will not place him out of risk. Indeed, the cleverer he is, the more likely he is to become, to this extent, the slave of his shop. This is not meant of the man of genius, of course, the many-sided man, but of the busy, practical man of common life. Say that he is of more than average intellect, that he has talent, and, still better, a wise and honest love for his science, his art, or whatever may be the name of his work, he will be at a disadvantage as compared with the man who, failing either in the ability or in the energy necessary for concentration, has been enabled to learn a little plausible ignorance on a good many topics of general interest. Now over-concentration may be damaging to the balance of his mind, and without doubt concentration which is in other respects not over-concentration is detrimental to him as a conversationalist, lessening the superficies over which his tongue can travel. But since the poor fellow is so ill off that there is only one class of topics on which he can enter readily, may there not be something gained for his associates as well as for him in letting him go his own way? If one found oneself in the company of the philosopher who has concentrated his life on the dative case, it might be better to put him to discourse on the dative case than to elicit his dulness on the weather. One might not succeed in achieving even a temporary sympathy with his fervor, but one would at least have learned something about the dative case. And a man must be very stupid indeed—or else his listener is very stupid indeed—who can talk freely and earnestly on a subject which thoroughly interests him without the listener's becoming interested, if not in the subject, at least in the interest it has for its exponent. Nor need the listener's interest be lessened, surely, if he is hearing several men skilled and eager in some special pursuit talking with each other, instead of only one such man talking with him.