A customer-service representative from Seattle, Washington, is curious about the phrases people use as a part of leave-taking when they’re finishing a telephone conversation. Linguists who conduct discourse analysis on such conversations say these exchanges are less about the statements’ literal meaning and more about ways of coming to a mutual agreement that it’s time to hang up. Incidentally, physicians whose patients ask the most important questions or disclose key information just as the doctor is leaving refer to this as doorknobbing or getting doorknobbed. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “How We Finish Conversations”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Joe from Seattle, Washington.
Hey, Joe.
Hi, Joe. What’s up?
I’m living the dream. How are you?
Living the dream? Me too.
Me too.
How can we help? What’s on your mind?
So I talk to a lot of people on the phone for work pretty regularly, and I’ve noticed over the last year or so, whenever the phone call’s over, it takes us like three times to say goodbye.
Phone calls sort of end up with, well, thanks a lot. Thank you. Take care. Take care. Okay, bye now. Okay, bye.
And I was wondering if there was a name for this or if this was common. It seems sort of like a conditional goodbye as we’re asking permission to end the conversation.
So much to unpack here. Let me ask first, what kind of phone work do you do? Are you customer service or a receptionist somewhere?
Yeah, I work in customer service.
Oh, and you don’t have a script for that kind of thing?
No.
I work for an insurance company for pets, and they want us to be as authentic and upfront as possible.
Right.
Okay, that’s nice. Well, congratulations to them for not just automatically doing the script. You sound like a charming fellow, and wow, that’s a great business move on their part.
But let’s answer your question, which is, what is going on when somebody has these long goodbyes? You know, in this little group of people who put this radio show together, we call that doorknobbing or door hanging because somebody just won’t hang up. They just won’t go.
Yeah, we learned that from a doctor.
Yeah, we learned it from a doctor. Doorknob hanging.
Right. Well, he’d mentioned it’s when you’ve had the whole patient, you know, they’ve been in there, taken off their clothes, had the stethoscope, the whole bit. And then right as they’re ready to go, they’ll go, oh, yeah, doctor, one more thing. And it’s like Columbo. It’s the real big thing. It’s the thing they actually meant to talk to him about.
Yeah, while your hand is already on the doorknob. You’re ready to move on.
There is a study, there is a part of linguistics called discourse analysis that looks into what you’ve described. And in that field, it’s usually called leave taking. You’re taking your leave. And there’s a whole analysis that you can do of looking at the different roles that people play when they hang up or they part company. And a lot of it is ritualistic with almost no real semantic content. That is, it’s really about whose turn is next and not actually what they’re saying. And it sounds like that’s what’s going on.
I would say your mention that you’ve noticed it in the last year is a little bit of a red herring because it isn’t new. It’s as old as humankind or as old as human speech at least, but leave-taking is culturally associated. Our leave-taking in the English-speaking North American part of the world would be different, say, than the leave-taking in the Russian-speaking Asian part of the world.
So, Joe, the leave-taking that we do, and we do a little bit of this on the show, but the leave-taking we do is a little bit, like you said, about asking permission. Is it all right if I go? And also trying not to do it too abruptly because even if the call was completely nice, and you sound like a nice guy, if you hang up too abruptly, they might automatically change their opinion of the whole conversation and go, oh, he’s mad at me. Oh, he doesn’t like me. I did something wrong.
And so the slow, steady, all right now, see you there. All right, take care now. Talk to you next time. All right, goodbye. Bye. That whole thing, we have to do it. We have to do it, at least in our culture.
So, Joe, I guess the best word we have for that to give you is leave-taking.
Okay.
Nothing fancier than that.
So now I’m going to watch how this goes.
Okay. Joe, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.
There you go. I’m sorry. I went on and on there, but I had so much to say.
Joe, it’s great. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. And give us a call sometime. I’m really interested in your work in customer service and what else happens when you have conversations with people.
Yeah, a lot of things happen when you have conversations with people. The cool stuff, the interesting stuff, the weird stuff.
Take care now.
Okay, Joe. Take care. Bye-bye.
Thank you so much.
