In American romance, almost nothing rates higher than what the movie men have called "meeting cute" -- that is, boy-meets-girl seems more adorable if it doesn't take place in an atmosphere of correct and acute boredom.
Just about the most enthralling real-life example of meeting cute is the Charles MacArthur-Helen Hayes saga: reputedly all he did was give her a handful of peanuts, but he said simultaneously, "I wish they were emeralds".
Aside from the comico-romantico content here, a good linguist-anthropologist could readily pick up a few other facts, especially if he had a little more of the conversation to go on.

The way MacArthur said his line -- if you had the recorded transcript of a professional linguist -- would probably have gone like this: Af Primary stresses on emeralds and wish;
note pitch 3 (pretty high) on emeralds but with a slight degree of drawl, one degree of oversoftness.
Conclusions: The people involved (and subsequent facts bear me out here) knew clearly the relative values of peanuts and emeralds, both monetary and sentimental.
And the drawling, oversoft voice of flirtation, though fairly overt, was still well within the prescribed gambit of their culture.

In other words, like automation machines designed to work in tandem, they shared the same programming, a mutual understanding not only of English words, but of the four stresses, pitches, and junctures that can change their meaning from black to white.
At this point, unfortunately, romance becomes a regrettably small part of the picture;
but consider, if you can bear it, what might have happened if MacArthur, for some perverse, undaunted reason, had made the same remark to an Eskimo girl in Eskimo.
To her peanuts and emeralds would have been just so much blubber.
The point -- quite simply -- is this: words they might have had;
but communication, no.

This basic principle, the first in a richly knotted bundle, was conveyed to me by Dr. Henry Lee Smith, Jr., at the University of Buffalo, where he heads the world's first department of anthropology and linguistics.
A brisk, amusing man, apparently constructed on an ingenious system of spring-joints attuned to the same peppery rhythm as his mind, Smith began his academic career teaching speech to Barnard girls -- a project considerably enlivened by his devotion to a recording about "a young rat named Arthur, who never could make up his mind".
Later, he became one of the central spirits of the Army Language Program and the language school of Washington's Foreign Service Institute.
It was there, in the course of trying to prepare new men for the "culture shock" they might encounter in remote overseas posts, that he first began to develop a system of charting the "norms of human communication".

To the trained ear of the linguist, talk has always revealed a staggering quantity of information about the talker -- such things as geographical origin and/or history, socio-economic identity, education.
It is only fairly recently, however, that linguists have developed a systematic way of charting voices on paper in a way that tells even more about the speakers and about the success or failure of human communication between two people.
This, for obvious reasons, makes their techniques superbly useful in studying the psychiatric interview, so useful, in fact, that they have been successfully used to suggest ways to speed diagnosis and to evaluate the progress of therapy.

In the early 1950's, Smith, together with his distinguished colleague, George Trager (so austerely academic he sometimes fights his own evident charm), and a third man with the engaging name of Birdwhistell (Ray), agreed on some basic premises about the three-part process that makes communication: (1) words or language (2) paralanguage, a set of phenomena including laughing, weeping, voice breaks, and "tone" of voice, and (3) kinesics, the technical name for gestures, facial expressions, and body shifts -- nodding or shaking the head, "talking" with one's hands, et cetera.

Smith's first workout with stresses, pitches, and junctures was based on mother, which spells, in our culture, a good deal more than bread alone.
For example, if you are a reasonably well-adjusted person, there are certain ways that are reasonable and appropriate for addressing your mother.
The usual U.S. norm would be: Af Middle pitches, slight pause (juncture) before mother, slight rise at the end.
The symbols of mother's status, here, are all usual for culture U.S.A.
Quite other feelings are evidenced by this style: Af Note the drop to pitch 1 (the lowest) on mother with no rise at the end of the sentence;
this is a "fade" ending, and what you have here is a downtalking style of speech, expressing something less than conventional respect for mother.
Even less regard for mom and mom's apple pie goes with: Af In other words, the way the speaker relates to mother is clearly indicated.
And while the meaning of the words is not in this instance altered, the quality of communication in both the second and third examples is definitely impaired.
An accompanying record of paralanguage factors for the second example might also note a throaty rasp.
With this seven-word sentence -- though the speaker undoubtedly thought he was dealing only with the subject of food -- he was telling things about himself and, in the last two examples, revealing that he had departed from the customs of his culture.

The joint investigations of linguistics and psychiatry have established, in point of fact, that no matter what the subject of conversation is or what words are involved, it is impossible for people to talk at all without telling over and over again what sort of people they are and how they relate to the rest of the world.
Since interviewing is the basic therapeutic and diagnostic instrument of modern psychiatry, the recording of interviews for playbacks and study has been a boost of Redstone proportions in new research and training.
Some of the earliest recordings, made in the 1940's demonstrated that psychiatrists reacted immediately to anger and anxiety in the sound track, whereas written records of the same interview offered far fewer cues to therapy which -- if they were at all discernible in print -- were picked up only by the most skilled and sensitive experts.
In a general way, psychiatrists were able to establish on a wide basis what many of them had always felt -- that the most telling cues in psychotherapy are acoustic, that such things as stress and nagging are transmitted by sound alone and not necessarily by words.

At a minimum, recording -- usually on tape, which is now in wide professional use -- brings the psychiatric interview alive so that the full range of emotion and meaning can be explored repeatedly by the therapist or by a battery of therapists.
Newest to this high-powered battery are the experts in linguistics who have carried that minimum to a new level.
By adding a systematic analysis with symbols to the typed transcripts of interviews, they have supplied a new set of techniques for the therapist.
Linguistic charting of the transcribed interview flags points where the patient's voice departs from expected norms.
It flags such possible breakdowns of communication as rehearsed dialogue, the note of disapproval, ambivalence or ambiguity, annoyance, resentment, and the disinclination to speak at all -- this last often marked by a fade-in beginning of sentences.

Interpretation, naturally, remains the role of the therapist, but orientation -- not only the patient's vocal giveaways of geographical and socio-economic background, but also vocal but non-verbal giveaways of danger spots in his relationship to people -- can be considerably beefed up by the linguist.
His esoteric chartings of the voice alert the therapist to areas where deeper probing may bring to light underlying psychological difficulties, making them apparent first to the therapist and eventually to the patient.
In one now-historic first interview, for example, the transcript (reproduced from the book, The First Five Minutes) goes like this: The therapist's level tone is bland and neutral -- he has, for example, avoided stressing "you", which would imply disapproval;
or surprise, which would set the patient apart from other people.
The patient, on the other hand, is far from neutral;
aside from her specifically regional accent, she reveals by the use of the triad, "irritable, tense, depressed", a certain pedantic itemization that indicates she has some familiarity with literary or scientific language (i.e., she must have had at least a high-school education), and she is telling a story she has mentally rehearsed some time before.
Then she catapults into "everything and everybody", putting particular violence on "everybody", indicating to the linguist that this is a spot to flag -- that is, it is not congruent to the patient's general style of speech up to this point.
Consequently, it is referred to the therapist for attention.
He may then very well conclude that "everybody" is probably not the true target of her resentment.
Immediately thereafter, the patient fractures her rehearsed story, veering into an oversoft, breathy, sloppily articulated, "I don't feel like talking right now".

Within the first five minutes of this interview it is apparent to the therapist that "everybody" truthfully refers to the woman's husband.
She says later, but still within the opening five minutes, "I keep thinking of a divorce but that's another emotional death".

The linguistic and paralinguistic signals of misery are all present in the voice chart for this sentence;
so are certain signals that she does not accept divorce.
By saying "another emotional death", she reveals that there has been a previous one, although she has not described it in words.
This the therapist may pursue in later questioning.
The phrase, "emotional death", interesting and, to a non-scientific mind, rather touching, suggests that this woman may have some flair for words, perhaps even something of the temperament regrettably called "creative".

Since the psychiatric interview, like any other interview, depends on communication, it is significant to note that the therapist in this interview was a man of marked skill and long experience.
His own communication apparatus operated superbly, and Lillian Ross readers will note instantly its total lack of resemblance to the blunted, monumentally unmeshed mechanism of Dr. Blauberman.
Interestingly enough -- although none of the real-life therapists involved could conceivably compare with Blauberman -- when groups of them began playing back interviews, they discovered any number of ways in which they wanted to polish their own interview techniques;
almost everyone, on first hearing one of his own sessions on tape, expressed some desire to take the whole thing over again.

Yet, in spite of this, intensive study of the taped interviews by teams of psychotherapists and linguists laid bare the surprising fact that, in the first five minutes of an initial interview, the patient often reveals as many as a dozen times just what's wrong with him;
to spot these giveaways the therapist must know either intuitively or scientifically how to listen.
Naturally, the patient does not say, "I hate my father", or "Sibling rivalry is what bugs me".
What he does do is give himself away by communicating information over and above the words involved.
Some of the classic indicators, as described by Drs. Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy in The First Five Minutes, are these: ambiguity of pronouns:

Stammering or repetition of I, you, he, she, et cetera may signal ambiguity or uncertainty.
On the other hand significant facts may be concealed -- she may mean I or everybody, as it did with the tense and irritable woman mentioned before, may refer to a specific person.
The word that is not used can be as important as the word that is used;
therapist and/or linguist must always consider the alternatives.
When someone says, for example, "They took x-rays to see that there was nothing wrong with me", it pays to consider how this statement would normally be made.
(This patient, in actuality, was a neurasthenic who had almost come to the point of accepting the fact that it was not her soma but her psyche that was the cause of her difficulty.
) Amateur linguists note here that Pursewarden, in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, stammered when he spoke of his wife, which is hardly surprising in view of their disastrous relationship.