Simple question for Monday

[muckefuck]

What is your favourite response to "How are you?"-type questions?
What response(s) would you wink out of existence if you could?

Comments

[tortipede.livejournal.com]

I used to work in a psychiatric hospital, and whenever staff asked the patients how they were, the answer was almost always 'fine'. Only when a friend of mine was later hospitalized did I find out that the standing joke amongst the patients was that this stood for "Fucked up, insecure, neurotic and emotional." I've since heard variations on this from other sources, but that was the first time I'd come across it.

Kate Fox, in Watching the English, points out that the traditionally correct response to the traditional greeting "How do you do?" is to repeat the question back. "'How do you do?' is not a real question about health or well-being, and 'Nice day, isn't it?' is not a real question about the weather."

So my favourite answer has to be that of the friend of a friend who, having just split up with her boyfriend, treated a passing acquaintance's 'How are you?' as a real question. She snapped back at them, "I'd gladly die!", burst into tears, and turned and stalked off into college.

A close second is an ex-girlfriend of mine who, studying in the US and misled by the apparent sincerity of tone in which someone (at a party) asked how she was, began to give a detailed answer. Part way through her answer her interlocutor exclaimed "Jeez! I only asked how you were -- I didn't want your life history!" and walked off to find someone else to talk to.

And my poor third is my own answer to the one Jamaican student I knew in college. Sean would always ask me "What's happenin', man?", and it took a long time before I worked out that that didn't really require an informative answer, either...