I counted. It was a housewarming in October outside Columbus, about thirty people, and by the end of the evening I had heard "we're so lucky with the light in here" from four different guests, three of whom had not spoken to each other.
This is not a complaint about small talk. Small talk is load-bearing and I will defend it against anyone. It is an observation about how quickly a phrase can become the correct thing to say, and about what that does to the possibility of anyone saying anything else.
Once "we're so lucky with the light" is available in a room, it is not merely one option among many. It is the option that costs nothing — no risk, no exposure, no chance of landing wrong. Anything else a guest might say about the house involves a judgement, and a judgement can be disagreed with. So the phrase spreads through the evening not because people are unoriginal but because it is the local minimum, and conversation, like water, finds it.
What I have come to think is that the supply of these phrases has increased enormously, and that this is doing something to how people talk that nobody chose.
Twenty years ago a phrase like that came from a small pool: family, the county you grew up in, television, whatever books you had. It circulated slowly enough that using one still felt like a choice. Now the pool is everyone, refreshed daily, and the phrases arrive pre-tested — they exist because they performed well, which is to say because they were the safest available response to a recognisable situation. We are all reading from a script optimised for not going badly.
You can hear it most clearly where the stakes are highest. Sympathy has almost entirely converted. When something bad happens to someone now, the responses arrive in a narrow band of about six sentences, all of them kind, all of them correct, none of them from the specific person saying them. I have received them. I have sent them. They are better than nothing, which is what people said before when they were frightened of saying the wrong thing, and I notice I still feel slightly worse after receiving four identical ones than after receiving one clumsy sentence from somebody who was clearly struggling.
The counter I would make against myself: this is what language does, and every generation has heard the phrases of the next as hollow. The Victorians had a stock of consolation formulas as rigid as anything we have. Complaining about it is very close to complaining that other people are not more interesting, which is a complaint about oneself.
Fair. So let me put it more narrowly. I am not claiming the phrases are worse. I am claiming there are more of them, they arrive faster, and the gap between the situation occurring and the correct response being available has closed to nearly nothing — which removes the pause in which someone might have said something of their own.
The pause is what I miss. Not eloquence. The three seconds where somebody visibly did not know what to say.
At the party, late, the host's brother looked around at the room and said it reminded him of a flat their aunt had in Belfast, which had bad light and was the happiest he had ever been. Nobody knew what to do with that. It was the only thing anyone said all evening that I still remember.
The aunt's flat in Belfast with the bad light is the only thing in this essay I will remember in a year, which I assume is the point, and it is a slightly annoying point to have made so well.