“That’s interesting…”
Always confuses me when I get this response. Was my comment boring, absurd, an impossible suggestion, have I altered someone’s universe? Or do they just want me to stop talking. It’s the adjective equivalent of Switzerland.
Ever seen Captain Fantastic? There’s a scene where the father asks the daughter what she thinks of the book she’s reading and she replies, “It’s interesting.” She gets verbally pummelled for using a non-word.
Kielyr: What’s a bordello?
Ben: A whorehouse… What are you reading?
Kielyr: Lolita.
Ben: And?
Kielyr: It’s interesting.
Rellian: Interesting!
Bo: Illegal word!
Zaja: Dad, Kielyr said interesting!
Ben: Interesting is a non-word. You know you’re supposed to avoid it… Be specific.
Leaving the cinema I banned “interesting” from my vocabulary and condemned everyone who used it as lacking imagination. That was until I heard Adam Grant interview Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell argues that to be interesting, a story must include high levels of specificity, that is, lots of details. He says, “the quality of being specific and being able to illustrate your larger points with a high level of precision is the quality that makes something interesting.” Really?
Grant counters sighting a paper by sociologist Murray Davis who said that ideas survive not because they are true but because they depart from conventional wisdom.
Something that just affirms your assumptions is boring. It doesn’t pique your curiosity, doesn’t arouse the senses. There’s no element of surprise. You think to yourself, “I know that, so what?”
When it’s interesting you get a little adrenaline rush, you sit up and want to know more. You go — “ha! That’s different from what I already thought or believed and I like it!” Interesting is something that conflicts with your assumptions.
To change someone’s perspective, you’ve got to remain interesting. That said, not all our assumptions like to be challenged. Confronting a strongly-held assumption can piss people off. At 1880, we care so much about your opinions and assumptions, we want to make sure we keep challenging them.
We’ve lined up some wonderfully interesting events over the coming months, including Engaging the Pink Dollar, Women and their Stories of Triumph, and an entire series of back to school classes to challenge our comfort zones.
M
