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Small talk varies country to country and people to people. Southern Europeans, for example, are said to be very good at using lots of words to convey very little information. [15] Also, small talk rules and topics can differ widely between cultures. Weather is a common topic in regions where the climate has great variation and can be unpredictable.
Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous, political speech that originated in Ohio and was most notably used in his successful 1920 US presidential campaign by Warren G. Harding. He subsequently described it as "the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing". [1] His opponent, William Gibbs McAdoo, compared it to ...
Look up platitude in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. A platitude is a statement that is seen as trite, meaningless, or prosaic, aimed at quelling social, emotional, or cognitive unease. [1] The statement may be true, but its meaning has been lost due to its excessive use as a thought-terminating cliché. [2]
In semiotics and discourse analysis, floating signifiers (also referred to as empty signifiers, [1] although these terms have been made distinct [2]) are signifiers without a referent. The term open signifier is sometimes used as a synonym due to the empty signifier's nature to "resist the constitution of any unitary meaning", enabling its ...
Alogia. In psychology, alogia (/ ˌeɪˈloʊdʒiə, əˈloʊdʒiə, əˈlɒdʒiə, - dʒə /; from Greek ἀ-, "without", and λόγος, "speech" + New Latin -ia) [1][2][3] is poor thinking inferred from speech and language usage. [4] There may be a general lack of additional, unprompted content seen in normal speech, so replies to questions ...
Phatic expression. In linguistics, a phatic expression (English: / ˈfætɪk /, FAT-ik) is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships. In other words, phatic expressions have mostly socio- pragmatic rather than semantic functions. They can be observed in everyday conversational exchanges, [1] as in, for ...
Blank expression. A blank expression, also known as a poker face, is a facial expression characterized by neutral positioning of the facial features, implying a lack of strong emotion. It may be caused by a lack of emotion, depression, boredom or slight confusion, such as when a listener does not understand what has been said.
Tabula rasa. Tabula rasa (/ ˈtæbjələ ˈrɑːsə, - zə, ˈreɪ -/; Latin for "blank slate") is the idea of individuals being born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences. Proponents typically form the extreme "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, arguing ...