March 11, 2008
Bidness
Our town depends a lot on the tourist trade. You know, Music City USA and even Athens of the South and all. This makes for one thing the taxis a lot of bidness. Not to mention the guitar stores and the ubiquitous guitar-carriers usually walking the streets.
As it is, it’s our taxi drivers that have come to notice of late. It is claimed by some that they’re not being conversational enough, and depending on where they come from, that they don’t speak much English. Depending, as well, on where even our visiting American tourists come from, neither do they themselves speak a lot, at least not the sort one hears like from around here. Chamber of Commercial interests are increasingly troubled by these complaints about the taxi drivers and whether tourists can find their ways to the stores and other entertainment so they can spend their money which is all the same.
The drivers are also being criticized for being rude. I don’t know how anybody can tell, there being this language gap and all. Some linguist once did a study of conversations and found out somehow that only seven percent of our exchanges are communicated by words, thirty-eight percent by tone of voice, and the rest by body language. I don’t know how one can tell riding in a taxi, the driver usually in front, the rider usually in back with the traffic noise. Of course, there are such things as shrugged shoulders.
The Pulitzer novelist Toni Morrison says (I know, I quote her a lot, especially this) that it is language that makes us human. I don’t think she said what kind of language or whether she considered that even trees are said to have a sort of communication themselves. If we would just take into account that our being human is perhaps held more in common by most of us than is our language, and that we all have some kind or another, maybe even sappier than the trees, it might make for a better world all around, one increasingly as it is made up a lot of tourists and taxis.
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos