When to nod your head…
1. When answering in the affirmative a question asked to you directly or to a small group, which includes you.
2. When given a list of demands by a mugger/killer/or the like and one of the demands is to shut the f**k up and then ironically, the criminal asks if you understand.
When not to nod your head…
1. When listening to a lecture given by a scholar and you agree with everything she/he is saying.
2. When anticipating everything the scholar is saying because you know it all.
3. When attempting to seem brilliant.
Why…
1. Because it is distracting and causes normal, rational, reasoning people who are not at all interested in putting on airs to seethe with a silent yet intense wrath that will later cause an ulcer.
Are you saying Greg is in Sofia?
ReplyDeleteThere are Gregs all over the world: in all departments, present at every lecture.
ReplyDeleteI hate our Greg. I've been fantasizing about ways to humiliate him all day.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Whitney, for so well summarizing the subtle art of head nodding (which, btw, made me really self-conscious sitting next to you in lecture yesterday, bc I realized there is another head-nod, bc I was doing it!) The other, I have discovered, is when (if a lecture is given in English, say) the speaker is not a native English-speaker, and the listener is nodding so that when the speaker is staring at the listener, the listener (who IS a native English-speaker) feels like she is encouraging the speaker, and thus preventing embarrassment. Just wanted to point that one out...