Communicating and Storytelling

Le Ton-Ton et Moi, 1992 (?)

I remember clearly this moment in Pittsburgh when I was in my mid 20's and I was at a dinner party with maybe 15 or so CMU grad students and I was telling a story.  I looked up and every face was turned to me and listening intensely.  I was slightly taken aback and realized that I was channeling my uncle.  This picture above shows Uncle Roger and I circa 1992 one summer in Corsica.  He is the most masterful storyteller I have ever met.  I have seen him talk about a grocery store visit (that I was with him on!) and have an audience of sophisticated adults just eating out of the palm of his hand as he pontificated about us shopping for bread and eggs or something.  Great storytellers don't even really need good material, they have an intensity about them and an intuition about their audience that allows them to just get right in their head.

Today I was talking to AT while she was prepping for her French oral test and it got me thinking about how much of good communication is using words that others want to hear, phrasing things like they do, even inflecting accents in a similar way.  My uncle is not multilingual but his gift at communicating transcends language.  Part of his trick is to actually speak with the accent of his listener.  After spending a day with me, my aunt will laugh at him and call him out for speaking French with an American accent!  I have seen him go from speaking continental French with a colleague to Arabic-accented French with a Moroccan field worker to Corsican-inflected French with the Corsican foreman.  No one even seemed to notice except for me - it was amazing!

Now, I'm thinking about how just the other day when AC was talking in Mandarin to her friend (LL) and I inserted a couple of comments in English in the middle of their conversation.  She was surprised and asked if I actually knew Mandarin or was a lucky guesser.  In retrospect, I just knew they were talking about directions and between the body language and maybe a word or two here and there, it just made sense.  So much of communication is assumption and circumstance, isn't it?