As Emily Rine Butler, who teaches linguistics at the University of Florida, explained to me in an email, the dialogue is an “adjacency pair,” or a short two-person script that is performed in a particular order. The “How are you?” “I’m fine” exchange has typically been a bit of a deceptive one. To ask “How are you?” is either to make the conversation very gloomy, very fast or to force someone to lie straight to your face and say they’re fine. This moment has laid bare the extent to which “How are you?” is a mere pleasantry and not an honest inquiry in search of an honest answer. The coronavirus pandemic and its effects are dramatic and widespread enough that it’s safe to assume everyone’s life has changed for the worse in some way. The innocuous “How are you?” at the start of a conversation-which is normally understood in American culture to be a polite way of expressing concern for a person’s well-being, and to which the socially agreed-upon response is “I’m good,” “I’m fine,” or “I’m doing well”-hits differently in the COVID-19 era. Are we really going to paper over these grim truths with the usual, compulsorily breezy “I’m good! You?”
Our jobs, and really our entire financial futures, are in jeopardy. Maybe we’re lucky enough not to be sick or dying, but any of us could be soon. How are we? People are sick and dying in alarming numbers all around us. And then we both spend a long moment gazing directly into the abyss. Every conversation I have these days with someone who doesn’t live in my home-every FaceTime with a friend or family member, every reporting phone call-kicks off with a brief, awkward, accidental meditation on mortality.
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