Department of Linguistics
A NATIONAL BULLETIN ON ISSUES IN
AUSTRALIAN STYLE AND ENGLISH IN AUSTRALIA
| Volume 16 No 2 | December 2009 |
book notes 2Adam Smith reviews Torbjorn Lundmark’s Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals around the World. The author and illustrator of this book specialises in telling the unexpected stories behind mundane objects and habits that we take for granted. His previous book, Quirky Qwerty, reviewed in Australian Style 10.1, gave us potted histories about each of the symbols on the keys of that ubiquitous modern took, the computer keyboard. The current, similarly pocket-sized volume, takes on the expansive topic of how different cultures greet and farewell each other. While the range of areas for discussion on a keyboard are naturally circumscribed by the number of keys, the scope for treating this fundamental form of human interaction is almost boundless. Lundmark doesn’t limit himself to any particular area of the world, or merely to the verbal. His book is divided into three sections: “Gestures and Signals”, “Customs and Behaviours” and “Names and Addresses”. Under these headings we discover that a form of the Nazi (originally Roman) salute was used to honour the Stars and Stripes up until 1942; the Damin language from the Mornington Peninsula has two sounds not found in any other language in the world (technically described as the “ingressive lateral fricative” and the “ejective bilabial stop”; in Chinese there is a specific term for “my mother’s brother’s son who is older than I am” – jiubiaoxiong. These headings do not always successfully delineate the material, so we are told more than once about methods for avoiding greeting, or about the decline of the use of “you” in Swedish. But we can forgive these occasional repetitions as the by-products of the collector’s enthusiasm. This is not meant to be either an exhaustive or an academically systematic study of greeting and parting rituals. Lundmark’s approach is that of the bower bird, honing in on the attractively curious – such as the Eskimo version of the handshake, the shoulder-strike – as well as the familiar. The author is Swedish born, but resident in Australia, so these cultures feature heavily, alongside customs from China, Japan, Britain, the US, Poland, Africa and the Pacific Islands. The subject matter sometimes gives rise to stereotypes, as with the Englishmen whose sense of reserve dictates that they pass each other after weeks in the desert without a words of greeting. But the warmth and humour of Lundmark’s writing make these examples celebrations of quirkiness rather than social criticism. This is not a scholarly work, and there is the occasional factual error (such as the suggestion that Shakespeare’s As You Like It was written before Love’s Labour’s Lost), or generalisation. But the scope of the material and references indicate the author’s pleasure in research and desire to communicate this with his audience. It is a hospitable book, eager, like the typical Chinese host described in its pages, to detain its reader with another tempting morsel, and gently importuning you to “come back” after you have put it down. |