Filter Coffee #047

On Silence

Dear Readers,

I was browsing the web to see if there was anything special about May 23rd that would be of some interest. I learnt that May 23rd is World Turtle Day and I wondered if the clock would move slower on the 23rd than it did during the lockdown. 

Speaking of lockdown, don’t you think we are like turtles confined to our own shells? Alternatively, one could emulate the turtle and not be afraid to stick their neck out.

I know of three words with ‘turtle’ in them: ‘turtleneck’, ‘turtledove’, and ‘turned turtle’. Do you know if there are other such words? No need to hurtle, be a turtle — take your time and tell me.

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🤫 Speech is Silver, Silence is Golden

This idiom simply points out the relative merits of speech and silence  — after all, gold is more valuable than silver.

The origin of the idiom ‘silence is golden’ is traced back to the Egyptians who said: “Silence is more profitable than an abundance of speech”. There’s also a Chinese saying: “Silence is better than eloquence”. In all of these instances, when we refer to ‘silence is golden’ we mean the silence that is a product of discretion, situational judgement and maturity.

When we were kids, the house rule was that we should be seen and not heard. If we had to speak to elders it was with a voice that was umpteen octaves lower than the voice on the municipal ground. If one ventured to voluntarily strike a conversation with elders we would be told: “Speak when you are spoken to”. A frequent command in school was, “Silence! Finger on your lips!”.

As if to avenge all that, I have become a lawyer, a profession where I am surrounded by a cacophony of voices — not to forget my own voice trying to rise above the din. Speaking of law there's a legal phrase ‘silence by acquiescence’ which means if during interrogation a suspect remains silent it could be construed as guilt. This of course is not always true. This silence could be a product of fear of the unknown consequences of speaking.

It would be useful to refer to the idiom ‘cat got your tongue’ in this context. It dates back to 1800 and is rumoured to refer to a practice in ancient Egypt, in which a liar would have his tongue cut off and fed to the cats. But today it is used colloquially to refer to someone who has nothing to say or to compel someone to speak up by asking them, “Speak up! Cat got your tongue?”.

Silence can be a virtue in certain situations. Imagine you are a houseguest and you are caught in a situation where your friend, the husband, and his wife are squabbling over something. The situation is causing embarrassment and discomfiture as you can neither agree with your friend nor his spouse. You prefer to remain silent all through even if one of them looked to you for support or endorsement. The silence is truly golden.

It requires a lot of self-control and discipline to hold your tongue. As someone said, the tongue is in a slippery spot and one must be careful not to let it slip. Yet another saying suggests that we should put our brain in gear before engaging the mouth, or simply put — ‘think before you speak’. It also implies that silence should precede speech. Once uttered, words cannot be taken back. It is said that if you must talk, use words that are not bitter because you never know when you may have to eat them.

There are situations when one is left speechless and the silence that follows becomes an emotional response to a situation, which may be either good or bad. The person rendered speechless is often dumbfounded, dumbstruck or flummoxed. For example, I was speechless when I saw the Taj Mahal some 40 years back. I would be speechless if someone told me I won the lottery. Speechlessness is not silence. It is being at a loss for words. 

Imagine watching a play on stage. An actor's mind goes blank and he can’t remember his lines. There’s an awkward silence, both on stage and among the audience, before some whispering occurs on stage to prompt that person. I have heard of seasoned actors who ‘stage manage’ a stage induced fright when a character is tongue-tied. Imagine a guy playing a small role who is supposed to enter the stage and announce that someone has died. He enters and makes the mistake of looking at the hall full of audience, with everyone’s gaze on him, and forgets to say his lines. The seasoned actor manages the situation matter of factly and asks him, “why are you standing there tongue-tied as if somebody died?” Fortunately, the cue works and the scene is played out.

One can also lapse into silence when what is being discussed in the room is uninteresting or on a topic with which they aren’t familiar. Some prefer to remain silent for fear of displaying ignorance.

There are many who love their own voice and keep chatting away and you cannot get a word edgewise when they are talking. You could call them garrulous or loquacious. If speech is silver, their speech could be called ever silver or quicksilver.

Then there is the expression ‘pin drop silence’. This relates to a situation or a group of people and not a single individual. Imagine a well-known speaker is addressing a gathering and someone from the audience gets up and says “you are boring us to death”. The silence that follows would allow you to hear a pin dropping on the floor.

There is also this expression ‘radio silence’, which simply means that nothing is being broadcasted. Radio silence has its origin in military vocabulary. If the radio officer in the border area is unable to relay the happenings there, the command centre would call it radio silence.

But this expression is now used in normal conversation. For example, you can call up a friend who has not spoken to you for a while and ask, “Why this radio silence? No news from you!”.

A silent observer says nothing while absorbing all that is being said during a meeting or discussion. But the silent spectator is different. He could be a person who witnesses something (usually bad) happening but does nothing to stop it for fear of being involved or getting hurt. A silent spectator can be a reluctant witness when called to testify if the situation warrants. But a silent observer is often required to report to someone what he observed.

You may have witnessed a cricket match in a stadium at full capacity. The noise is deafening. When the favourite team fails to score the winning run off the last ball, there is a stunned silence among its supporters, which of course gets drowned in the hysterical screaming of the winning team's supporters.

Then there’s ‘cricket silence’, which has nothing to do with cricket. You are invited to spend a night in a faraway farmhouse. After dinner, all retire and you too go to your room but are unable to immediately fall asleep on an unfamiliar bed. You lie there and find the silence deafening. In other words, it is as if you are stone deaf and can’t hear a thing. Slowly, your straining ears pick up a sound, the chirping of the cricket. It is so silent all around that you can hear this and nothing else.

When you think of sign language you realise how much you can communicate in silence!

If you want to experience the power of silence you should, when good times are here again, travel to Igatpuri in Maharashtra and do a 10-day course in Vipassana. It is a unique experience, as you are not allowed to speak throughout. Try this 🔗 link.

Then there is ‘cell phone silence’. Families and friends meet and are often busy looking at their phones and hardly talking to each other. Some families have strict rules about the use of cell phones at the dining table or when the family members sit together in the living room or when guests come visiting.

I have coined the phrase ‘COVID silence’. This is a kind of alienating silence which means you are in the same house but feel lonely. You are constantly looking at the hundreds of forwards making you more alienated with all the information about COVID, both unsolicited and fake. Even if speech is attempted it is met with silence. This is one silence all of us need to shake off. We need to maintain sanity and lift the spirit of others around us. Remember mind over matter.

Take care my dear readers and continue to observe all the precautions. It is not over yet!

See you next week.