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You find yourself in a difficult conversation.

It's very emotional and heated, and there is a lot at stake.

It is an argument about what's true and what's not true.

You've planned for this conversation, but then you get in the conversation and you say the wrong thing. It comes out all garbled and just doesn't turn out right.

How do we learn exactly what to say?

How do we know to say the right thing, not just have some general principles like listen or be empathic, but how do we know exactly what words to say?

I'm going to tell you a little bit about how communication really works, that will help you learn exactly what to say in these difficult conversations.

Gmail & Finite Number of Possible Responses

So a while ago I saw this new feature on Gmail, you may have seen it too if you're a Gmail user. Suddenly, now you're typing and you're in the middle of a sentence and it suggests how it's going to complete the sentence. Not just a single word, but the entire phrase.

How does it do this? Often it's right, so I just hit tab and I accept the suggestion about what to say. How does Gmail know what I'm going to say? Aren't there an infinite number of things that I might say?

No, and this is the secret to communication I want to tell you about.

The reason Gmail can guess what you're going to say and make a good suggestion is that it has read millions, probably billions, of emails contained in the Gmail algorithm. The suggestions aren’t based on on your emails alone but on the billions of emails that it has read already.

What it learns by looking at billions of emails is that there isn't an infinite number of ways of saying things. There is a finite number of ways of saying things. In fact, people recycle the same phrases over and over and over again.

Communication Stock Phrases

When I was in graduate school, I read this paper about the phrasal lexicon. That's kind of an abstract term. What is a lexicon? A lexicon is like a list of words, and the dictionary is a kind of lexicon. But the phrasal lexicon means that there's a list of phrases that we pull from in our heads, not just a list of words.

All of communication is generated out of this phrasal lexicon, a list of stock phrases. This runs counter to something that linguists sometimes say, such as Noam Chomsky, who say that there's an infinite variety of sentences that we might say.

This is true in principle. In principle, there are an infinite number of sentences that a person might theoretically say. But in practice, in real situations, there are a small finite number of things that people actually say.

Learn the Phrasal Lexicon or Idiom

Well, how is this important and useful to us, people trying to learn how to be better communicators in practical situations? The relevance for us is that in any given situation, we can learn the lexicon of phrases or another way of saying it we can learn the idiom.

What's an idiom? It's like an ordinary pattern of colloquial speech. An idiom might be something like to “kick your butt,” but we're not really kicking your butt. It's an idiom that means to encourage you or tell you what to do in sort of harsh terms. There is a whole idiom for every situation.

So consider a situation. I've talked about a lot on this blog. I’ve written about comforting and providing emotional support to someone who is in distress. This is a vital skill in health communication, where I do a lot of my teaching and consulting, but it's an important skill throughout life.

It turns out that when we're comforting people, there are not an infinite number of things to say. There is actually a small finite list of things to say, and they occur over and over and over again in different comforting situations. So rather than trying to learn some general principles of comfort, which are not unimportant, I think that you should use some of the techniques I’ve given you before.

These general principles would be to label people's feelings, encourage them to express their feelings, and praise that which has been lost. But many of us are saying, “no, no, no, Bruce tell me what to say, let me memorize some phrases.”

I don't want you running around like a robot, but in fact, it's possible to memorize some of these phrases. I've tried to give you them in past videos and if you go download the eBook on empathy, you'll see a bunch of stock phrases I give you for common ways of doing emotional support.

But I think that the trick in any given situation is to find excellent examples, and with Google and certain kinds of books you can find these phrases. You can even ask friends what would they say in a given situation and begin to keep a catalog of these well said things.

I've given you an example of like Lincoln writing a condolence letter and I don't expect you to plagiarize Lincoln exactly, because that might look a little bit silly, although the words are beautiful. What you want to do is take some of the things that Lincoln said which you can learn about in How to Write a Condolence Letter Like Abe Lincoln and How to Avoid Misunderstanding: Use Abe Lincoln’s Foolproof Strategy! In both of those, I gave you specific phrases that Lincoln used, such as “I do not mean to say,” or “do not misunderstand me.”

You want to use exactly those phrases. In the eBook I give you comforting phrases, in the Lincoln video I give you condolence phrases.

I'm trying to teach you that there is a phrasal lexicon, an idiom, a set of things that are the sorts of things people say in this type of situation. You might think, “Well, every situation is different and how am I going recycle these phrases? Aren't people going to think I'm strange if I keep saying these same things?”

No, because you're going to put them sort of in your own style and people won't know. Plus, it won't matter because everyone is talking this way anyway. Everyone is just recycling the same phrases that they hear anyway.

You might think, “Well, there's an infinite variety of situations in life how could I ever memorize enough phrases?” No. There aren't really an infinite variety of situations. There are a large but finite variety of situations and they come in general types.

There are comforting situations and there are situations where we have to regulate and control other people's behavior. There are persuasion situations. There are situations where we have to offer a criticism or constructive suggestions. There are apology situations that these situations fall into a finite number of types.

Each one of these types of communication situations in a given language and culture has a set of stock phrases that are used in those situations. I've tried to supply those in certain stock situations and I'll continue doing that.

Summary

Ordinary language use comes in routine kinds of situations and within each of those situations there is a small number of phrases that get recycled over and over and over again. If you sometimes struggle to be articulate and find the right words to say, it may be because you're trying to memorize general rules instead of memorizing actual phrases and recycling those.

This may seem like strange advice, but I promise you, it's not. This is how everybody communicates by recycling turns of phrase. That's why reading poetry, literature, and well-written journalism is so useful because you read those phrases and you internalize the way those writers write. They become part of your own lexicon of phrases.

So that's it. Question of the day for today: what are stock phrases that you use over and over again that you've come to rely on as really effective? Tell me what they are and where you've learned them. Let me know which stock phrases work really well for you down in the comments and let me know what some of them are.