I haven’t heard of that game, but it’s a very interesting idea! I’ll have to give it a shot!
It sounds incredibly difficult though. The space of possible people you might be is very large. Plus the other person is fighting against, you, trying to figure out who they are before you can figure out who you are.
Interuption would be impolite of course so you have to be very subtle in steering the conversation.
Now that I think about it, maybe it isn’t so obvious that interruption is impolite. I am thinking back to a trip I had back home. My girlfriend and mom established a routine where they would continually interrupt each other right before the other one was finished speaking. I don’t like doing that, so I never really said anything when the three of us were hanging out.
Then I brought it up. I didn’t have this path traversal analogy at the time, but I basically tried to say what I was saying in this blog post about how it doesn’t give me a chance to have any input on where the conversation goes, and there are often times where they would steer it in one direction at times when I wasn’t ready to make that turn. They said I should just interrupt then. I said how that would be rude. They said no it isn’t. They both realized that they were constantly interrupting each other, but genuinely didn’t find it offputting at all. Think girl talk, I guess?
This is an anecdote of course, but thinking about it now, I feel like it is a convention I have seen in others before, and isn’t too uncommon.
That all is talking descriptively about whether it is impolite. Prescriptively, I think there are various situations where it shouldn’t be considered impolite.
I haven’t heard of that game, but it’s a very interesting idea! I’ll have to give it a shot!
It sounds incredibly difficult though. The space of possible people you might be is very large. Plus the other person is fighting against, you, trying to figure out who they are before you can figure out who you are.
Now that I think about it, maybe it isn’t so obvious that interruption is impolite. I am thinking back to a trip I had back home. My girlfriend and mom established a routine where they would continually interrupt each other right before the other one was finished speaking. I don’t like doing that, so I never really said anything when the three of us were hanging out.
Then I brought it up. I didn’t have this path traversal analogy at the time, but I basically tried to say what I was saying in this blog post about how it doesn’t give me a chance to have any input on where the conversation goes, and there are often times where they would steer it in one direction at times when I wasn’t ready to make that turn. They said I should just interrupt then. I said how that would be rude. They said no it isn’t. They both realized that they were constantly interrupting each other, but genuinely didn’t find it offputting at all. Think girl talk, I guess?
This is an anecdote of course, but thinking about it now, I feel like it is a convention I have seen in others before, and isn’t too uncommon.
That all is talking descriptively about whether it is impolite. Prescriptively, I think there are various situations where it shouldn’t be considered impolite.