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viously harmless, indifferent, human interest items. You will know if you are doing the right thing if more and more people will like you for it, and more particularly, if more and more people will like one another on account of your "gossiping." A rung higher in the art of conversation but more restricted in interest is shoptalk. There is, it seems to me, much misdirected criticism of shoptalk. Actually it can represent man at his very best. When a group of philologists have a convention, what are they actually doing but having a vast "shoptalk" extending over several days? What is a teachers' convention but educational shoptalk? If a huge expenditure of time and money is justified to bring people together for such formal shoptalks, then surely informal ones are equally to be encouraged. They perform the useful function of raising the general level of knowledge and efficiency in the various trades and professions. Shoptalk is of a high plane when it gets away from personalities to the real problems —mechanical, economic, social — of the "shop." If, for example, a half-dozen nurses get together and merely talk about the characteristics and affairs of the personnel, they are staying on the low level of shop gossip. But if they talk about new techniques in hosptalization or new theories on patient-nurse relationships, theirs is shoptalk of a high and valuable kind. |
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