A counting word where nobody counts

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I used a word from bookkeeping, talking about an arrangement, and it did not arrive as one word. It came in as clarity with one person and as an accusation with another. Nothing in the word had moved between the two.

I watched the second one land.

Two defaults sit under that, and they are not two amounts of goodwill. In the first, what goes out comes back, like for like, inside a time both sides would recognise. Somebody running it finds naming restful.

Saying what moved is how a thing gets to be real, and an arrangement nobody will describe reads as vague rather than warm. In the second, giving goes out uncounted, and keeping it uncounted is what the whole default is built around. Somebody running that one hears a description of what moved as news that a count was being kept, and the news does the damage on its own.

Whether the count came out well or badly does not get asked.

Neither default is the grown-up one, and neither is mine to correct.

Nobody across a table receives what a word means to the one saying it. What crosses is its ordinary sense, the first one everybody learned, and a listener goes with that unless somebody says otherwise, which in a conversation nobody stops to do. I built things into the word, and they stay with me.

A word goes out only if its first meaning does not pull against mine.

That is the condition, and it runs before the word does. What it changes is who does the work: a word that passes arrives with nothing to undo, and a word that fails arrives with its first meaning still on it, so the undoing falls to the listener, and nobody asked the listener whether they wanted the job.

Word

On the technical question the word was right. People hear money in it. I hear a direction with a name on it: a thing went one way, off somebody’s side, and the record says whose.

The sides stay apart. Nothing comes off one because something landed on the other, unless somebody decides it does, once, on purpose, and says so. I built on that.

The amount stays blank on every entry I keep, and leaving it blank has cost the record nothing.

The entries are ordinal: the one reading I take off a side is its deviation from a held spec, the state I wrote down for it the last time I looked, and a direction is enough for that reading.

A word can be exact in the hand that holds it and do harm in the hand that receives it.

Where actual bookkeeping happens, a split, a price, an invoice on the table, the word is only the name of what is going on, and it stays there. Anywhere else the condition stops it, and getting past some listeners is not the same as passing.

I ran the condition back over the words I work with. The five steps passed: want, terms, cost, position, action, each an ordinary word with nothing in its first meaning pulling the other way. The gate was running before I could say what it checked.

A word gets tested in the hand it is going to, and mine is the one hand where it always passes.

Distance

What the Gift Keeps

Marcel Mauss published The Gift in 1925, built from other people’s fieldwork: the kula that Bronisław Malinowski had followed out from the Trobriand Islands, the potlatch of the Pacific Northwest, the gift customs of the Maori. The argument is that in these systems no gift is free. Three obligations run under every one of them: to give, to receive, and to return.

Refusing a gift refuses the relation, and a gift kept without a return leaves the one who kept it lower than before. The obligation is carried for years, down to which valuable went to whom and what is still owed on it, and in the kula the return is not haggled over. Nobody says a price.

Nothing is missing because of that. Later theories of reciprocity argue with the book, Sahlins’s among them.

The Row and the Distance

Marshall Sahlins put the forms of giving in a row, in an essay of 1965, On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange, which became a chapter of Stone Age Economics in 1972. At one end is generalized reciprocity: giving where a return is expected only vaguely, with no time set for it, no amount and no kind, so a flow can run one way for a long stretch without the giving stopping. In the middle is balanced reciprocity: the customary equivalent, returned inside a short and known time, where a return that does not come strains the relation and can end it.

At the far end is negative reciprocity, the attempt to get something for nothing. The row is not a list of better and worse people. Sahlins laid it over distance: the uncounted kind among close kin, like for like further out, the grab at the edge among strangers.

At the near end the material side of a transaction is kept under the social side, and debts are not reckoned in the open. The row became the working vocabulary for reciprocity in anthropology, and the uncounted kind went on into Robert Putnam’s work on social capital, as the habit of doing something for somebody with nothing specific expected back.

Sahlins also saw the row work in both directions. A relation sets how things move between two people, and the way a thing moves tells both of them what the relation is. The second direction is the one that explains the landing.

A counting word said inside a relation somebody holds at the near end of the row does not only sound like money. It moves the relation outward, from where nobody reckons to where both sides can see what went which way, and it does the moving by being said. Being counted hurts before any count comes out, because the first thing a count tells you is where you stand: further out than you thought.

Heard by a default that runs like for like, the same word says nothing about distance. It says what moved.

The Weighing Is the Offence

In 1991, in Structures of Social Life, the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske proposed that people build their relations out of four elementary models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching and market pricing. Communal sharing sits close to the uncounted kind and equality matching close to like for like. Market pricing is where bookkeeping lives.

In 1997 Fiske and the psychologist Philip Tetlock named what happens when a thing held under one model is handled in the terms of another, above all when something held in common is set against a price: a taboo trade-off. People do not take it as a mistake of category. They take it as a moral offence.

Tetlock and colleagues showed in 2000 how little it takes. People read about a hospital administrator deciding whether to pay for a transplant that would save one child or put the money into the rest of the hospital. Choosing the hospital drew outrage, which nobody needed a study to predict.

The finding sat in the other version: the administrator who chose the child after a long time weighing it was thought worse of than the one who chose the child at once. Same outcome.

The weighing was the offence.

Tage Rai and Fiske pushed the frame further in 2011: much of what people feel as right and wrong, they argued, is the upkeep of these relations, each in its own terms.

Where My Word Sat

What I took from all of it is where my word sat on Sahlins’s row. The record I keep has no figure on it, so on the technical question it stands nearer the kula than a bank: a direction kept, no price said. The word I used for it comes from further out, the middle of the row at least, and in Fiske’s terms from market pricing.

In speech a word travels with its own model, not with the thing its speaker built under it. So in the uncounted default the word did two things at once. It brought a count into a place arranged to keep counts out, and it moved the relation outward by the saying, which is Sahlins’s second direction.

Tetlock’s study had already shown that the weighing is punished whatever it concludes. I did not have to mean any of it for the word to carry it. I dropped the case I had made for the word, a case correct on every technical point that answered a question nobody listening had asked.

Person

Saying a thing plainly costs me a translation.

I built the record with the technical word, in a language I learned second. For the things in it, that word is the one in reach. A plainer word exists a step further off, and a sentence already moving does not wait for the step.

So the technical word goes across the table.

On my side it costs nothing.

I had been calling that precision. It is a cost, moved off my side onto the listener’s.

Outside actual bookkeeping the vocabulary goes by person now, and the principle gets no vote. A counterpart whose default runs like for like still hears the technical word as clarity. Where the default is the uncounted kind, the technical word leaves the conversation and plainer ones do its work.

That is the person channel: a vocabulary for each channel, and a channel is one person.

Side does most of it. Something came off mine, something sits on yours now, and there is no sum in that for anybody to find.

For the rest I say who is carrying which part, and when something has gathered on one side long enough to be felt, I call it weight. Nobody calls a person dishonest for telling one fact in different words to different people, and I was already doing that all day with every word but the technical one. The translation is all it costs.

In the uncounted default the technical word comes with a sentence attached, and nobody has to say the sentence for it to be heard.

So there was a count running the whole time.

Accusation

Counting is what the word stands accused of, and the record under it never put a number on anything.

The fault the record was built against runs the other way. I sent supply out from my side for years and kept no entry for any of it, so afterwards there was nothing to show which way it had gone or whose side it came off. From outside, that has the shape of the near end of the row: one way, nothing reckoned, the giving not stopping.

That is the covert contract. An entry was all it lacked, and the record I built against it now gives one to what leaves my side, with the amount left off exactly as it was left off in the years when there were no entries at all.