新編大學(xué)英語(yǔ)第二冊(cè)u(píng)nit12 Text C: The Voices of Time

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UNIT 12 AFTER-CLASS READING 2; New College English (II)

The Voices of Time

1 Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken language. It can shout the truth where words lie.

2 Different parts of the day, for example, are highly significant in certain contexts. Time may indicate the importance of the occasion as well as on what level an interaction between persons is to take place. In the United States if you telephone someone very early in the morning, while he is shaving or having breakfast, the time of the call usually signals a matter of utmost importance or extreme urgency. The same applies for calls after 11:00 p.m. A call received during sleeping hours is apt to be taken as a matter of life and death, hence the rude joke value of these calls among the young.

3 How troublesome differing ways of handling time can be is well illustrated by the case of an American agriculturist assigned to duty as an attache of our embassy in a Latin country. After what seemed to him a suitable period he let it be known that he would like to call on the minister who was his counterpart. For various reasons, the suggested time was not suitable all sorts of cues came back to the effect that the time was not yet ripe to visit the minister. Our friend, however, persisted and forced an appointment which was reluctantly granted. Arriving a little before the hour (the American respect pattern), he waited. The hour came and passed; five minutes ten minutes fifteen minutes. At this point he suggested to the secretary that perhaps the minister did not know he was waiting in the outer office. This gave him the feeling he had done something concrete, and also helped to overcome the great anxiety that was stirring inside him. Twenty minutes twenty-five minutes thirty minutes forty-five minutes (the insult period)!

4 He jumped up and told the secretary that he had been "cooling his heels" in an outer office for forty-five minutes and he was "sick and tired " of this type of treatment. This message was relayed to the minister, who said, in effect, "Let him cool his heels." The attache's stay in the country was not a happy one.

5 The principal source of misunderstanding lay in the fact that in the country in question the five-minute-delay interval was not significant. Forty-five minutes, on the other hand, instead of being at the tail end of the waiting scale, was just barely at the beginning. To suggest to an American's secretary that perhaps her boss didn't know you were there after waiting sixty seconds would seem absurd, as would raising a storm about "cooling your heels" for five minutes. Yet this is precisely the way the minister perceived the protests of the American in his outer office! He felt, as usual, that Americans were being totally unreasonable.

6 Throughout this unfortunate episode the attache was acting according to the way he had been brought up. At home in the United States his responses would have been normal ones and his behavior legitimate. Yet even if he had been told before he left home that this sort of thing would happen, he would have had difficulty not feeling insulted after he had been kept waiting forty-five minutes. If, on the other hand, he had been taught the details of the local time system just as he should have been taught the local spoken language, it would have been possible for him to adjust himself accordingly.

7 What bothers people in situations of this sort is that they don't realize they are being subjected to another form of communication, one that works part of the time with language and part of the time independently of it. The fact that the message conveyed is not expressed in any formal vocabulary makes things doubly difficult, because neither party can get very explicit about what is actually taking place. Each can only say what he thinks is happening and how he feels about it. The thought of what is being communicated is what hurts.