On my morning walk to the convenient store to get a morning paper, I saw my neighbor sitting on her front porch. We always exchange greetings, and mine to her send her cats running. She asked how I was, and I said “great.” In response to my inquiry, she said that she was “good.” I stopped mid-stride beneath her poinsettia tree and turned and asked, “How can we get to ‘great?’” She laughed, and said, “I’m stupendous!”
On a previous outing this neighbor had reminded me of the difference between “doing” good and “being” well. When I saw her that morning, she asked how I was. “I’m good,” I replied, “and you?” She said “I’m doing well.” I took a couple of steps, turned and said to her, “I’m doing well, as well.” I do not often take shortcuts in speech, but greetings are the place where we are likely to take those shortcuts. We may be reluctant to greet each other with a mere “Hello,” so we add, “How are you?” This is an “extended hello,” which says that we see each other and may know each other slightly more than we know the mailperson and don’t want to be curt. The extended hello is not designed to get any real information about how the person’s life is going. We are, after all, passing each other in the hallway, in the bar and on the street. We are not prepared to hear the person’s life story. But we do want to communicate something about how we feel about life in general, and know, in a general way, how the other person feels.
Years ago, I came upon a man chuckling. “Superb,” he murmured, thinking he was alone. “That has to be CJ.” I was at the Marble Hill nuclear power site, where I worked as an artist, producing charts that tracked the progress of the installation of electrical cable and writing and publishing a company newsletter. The tool-belt wearing electricians could never accept that I was being paid to write and draw and were openly contemptuous of me. They would gather outside my cubicle and make fun of my activities. One day, I made a small sign, and posted it above the automatic label maker that I used to create the status charts. I heard the jingling belts behind me as the workers tried to figure out the word. “Eera- skib- ull” was my favorite guess for “irascible.” In an arrogant and obnoxious attempt to elevate the level of literacy on the job site, I responded to all greetings by telling people that I was “superb.”
A professor I met at Indiana University Southeast used to grouse about the vacuous comments we exchange. “Have a nice day,” he grumbled. “With all of the wonderful words crafted by writers such as Shakespeare, that is the best that we can do? Have a nice day?” I crept away as he ladled out clips from odes, sonnets and essays, but I gave some thought to what he was saying. Instead of saying, “It is what it is,” – which says nothing – I say “Res ipsa loquitur,” which is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.” In the pool halls that I frequent, no one questions me about that. It may be because they think I’m speaking Martian, but for those who care to ask, I am superb, I am doing superbly; I also feel well and am doing good things.
When I walked into Bookmamas later that week, Kathleen Angelone told me that she was doing well, and I thought, “That, is superb.”