Talking with strangers, falling foul of an adage

Prof Penny Russell.

An adage is frequently used in a metaphorical sense to help explain a complex message in just a few words.

The phrase such as “A fish always rots from the head down” is an adage suggesting that when an organization or state fails, it is the leadership that is the root cause.

The adage that the “spoken word can never be revoked” is understood to have a biblical history and that being the case it would undoubtedly not be used in its original format in today’s secular conversation.

However, only recently it surfaced during a short conversation with Sydney’s Professor Penny Russell on one of Brisbane’s wonderful “CityCat” ferries.

Prof Russell was travelling to the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland to attend a meeting of the Australian Historical Association.

As an historian, Prof Russell has long been eager to better understand manners and broader behaviour and so in 2010 wrote about much of what she had learned in the book “Savage or Civilized?”

In the introduction to the book, Prof Russell said that when she told people she was writing about Australian manners, they tended to laugh and ask, “Have you found any yet?”

Quizzed about the book, it quickly became obvious that what the Professor had written was not proscriptive, that is deciding what is right and wrong and so suggesting answers, rather it was descriptive, simply explaining what existed and why.

Prof Russell said she always found that one generation frequently considered its manners to be better than those of following generations.

That, she explained is rather subjective and needs to be considered in the context of the times – for example Facebook demands manners that would be foreign to and simply unknown by people of even a generation earlier.

Discussing manners, Prof Russell said it was once considered an abuse of manners for a man to talk with a woman while wearing hat – bingo!

Yours truly was wearing a flat cap; an apology was volunteered and accepted by Prof Russell who said that it was just an example of what had once been common and as she could hear her own words as she looked at my cap.

It was a poignant lesson about manners and a wonderful example of how the spoken word can never be revoked.

Elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2012, Prof Russell is the Bicentennial Professor of Australian History, Chair at the Department of History at the University of Sydney.

Having only just begun to read her book, it seems a personal practice of talking with a stranger every day would have generations ago put me into the “savage” class as it was then considered bad manners to talk with anyone without first being introduced.

(Having read this, Prof Russell added an adage of her own: '”Beware of what you say to strangers, lest they turn out to be journalists”?)