QUESTION: Why don't people talk on elevators?
ANSWER: Stare at shoes. Glance at ceiling. Study elevator button panel as though it's the Rosetta stone. One minute on an elevator with a stranger takes about as long as the Jurassic Period.Granted, not everyone is fazed and muted by elevators. Some are as voluble as they would be at a cocktail party. A few are positively boorish, and their annoying loquacity highlights the first and most important reason that most people refrain from talking on elevators:
1. It's rude. On elevators with more than two people, it's not polite to talk to one person and ignore others with whom you are so intimately juxtaposed. Still, often you're silent when there's just one other person, which brings us to:
2. It's stupid. Elevator conversations are too abbreviated to be meaningful, so they're just wasted mental energy. We tend to hoard our mental energy. Consciously or unconsciously, we tend to limit the set of people in our lives to whom we owe the courtesy of conversation. If you do establish an elevator-talking relationship with someone, that might lead to uncomfortable conflicts during subsequent rides when you and your new elevator buddy are not alone, and you neither want to be rudely silent nor rudely talkative.
None of this explains the tension of elevator rides that is so out of proportion to the brevity and triviality of the encounter. So we must look at:
3. The invasion of personal space. We all have a private space surrounding us, any intrusion into which causes tension or discomfort. How far out does it go? It can cover an entire elevator. But you begin to feel noticeably uncomfortable when someone comes within 70 centimeters, about 2.5 feet, according to a study by sociologist Leslie Hayduk from the University of Alberta. The discomfort is markedly increased at about 50 centimeters and virtually intolerable at 30 centimeters. This is only when the intruder is in your face, though - your personal zone is smaller at your sides and back. That's why people who feel intruded upon will pivot and look away when they talk.
When your personal space is invaded - even from across an elevator - you become aroused. Not sexually. Aroused as in tense, alert, sensitive. This is why time passes so slowly on an elevator, and why you notice the silence.
QUESTION: Why do you always hear about the Third World but never the Second World?
ANSWER: It's kind of like the reichs in Germany. You never hear about the first or the second because NO ONE COUNTED UNTIL THE THIRD CAME ALONG. In other words, Hitler declared himself the leader of the Third Reich, but there was never a Second Reich. There was, however, a second reich (note the lower case: reich is German for empire), established by Bismarck when he united Germany in 1871. He called it simply "Deutsches Reich," German Empire. The first reich was "Das Heilige Romische Reich," the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne, established back when years had only three digits.
Worlds started to get numbers in 1955 when President Sukarno of Indonesia - we'd look up his first name, but it'll probably look like a typo - coined the term "Third World" in a speech. People quickly turned to their fingers and figured out that the capitalist "free" world was the first, and the Communist world the second.
In China, they think the First World is the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with other developed nations being the Second World and the poor countries, including China, being the Third World. Nowadays, it is gauche to say "Third World" because it implies third-rate, the bottom rung of the ladder, the tertiary position in a hierarchy. For a while, people referred to the "underdeveloped" countries, but even that is a bit insulting, hinting of underachievement. It's a bad description of those countries that, though poor economically, are rich in culture, like India. So now we say "developing."
THE MAILBAG:
John O. of Miami Beach asks:
Why can't I just "flick my Bic" on one of these major oceanic oil spills and burn that bad boy to oblivion?
Johnny, you can. Sometimes.
In fact, they tried that with the huge spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. It didn't work. The trick is, you have to start the fire soon after the spill, when the lighter, more volatile parts of the crude oil have yet to evaporate. Crude oil contains an assortment of hydrocarbon molecules, ranging from propane and butane to heavy, sludgy stuff that is basically asphalt. The lighter elements are what will burn on top of the ocean.
Flicking one's Bic over oil spills "is a time-honored process," says Exxon spokesman Amos Plante. One reason you don't see the technique more often is that you have to make sure there aren't any boats around, like grounded tankers, that might go up in flames. The other reason is that it makes an appalling pall of black smoke. You can just imagine what your basic major oil company thinks when it sees that it has not only polluted the ocean but also the atmosphere: Another public relations nightmare!