Meandering Tour

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Random observations about current events, language, science, technology, culture, and life -- with a touch of humor

Meandering Tour

How's Tricks? | The Bad Boy of Bar Charts | Teensy Bots | Romeo and Juliet | Squircles

Mar 18, 2026

5) “Hot Enough for Ya?”

I bumped into a friend at a party the other night and asked him, “How are you?” Without a hint of malice or contempt, he replied, “Why would you even ask me that?” I understood instantly that he was lamenting the current state of affairs.

After I meekly apologized, we spent the next few minutes discussing alternatives, to no avail.

The following day, I asked our global research team to investigate. It turns out there is a branch of social anthropology dedicated to “phatic” expressions — words or phrases used to establish a social connection rather than conveying information. Think “Whassup?” from the 1999 Budweiser campaign versus, say, “There’s a tornado coming.”

In other words, there’s typically no expectation of a response to “How are you?” other than “Fine, how are you?” It’s an icebreaker, that’s all.

Like when I lived in Boston and constantly heard people say, “Hey! How 'bout them Red Sox?"

The pioneering anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski introduced the concept of “phatic communion” in 1923 in an essay titled, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” based in part on his work with the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago off the eastern coast of New Guinea. (He is also credited with coining the term “nuclear family,” in 1924.)

Citing expressions such as “How do you do? and “Ah, here you are,” Malinowski wrote:

A mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among primitive tribes as in a European drawing-room, fulfills a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. . . . Are words in phatic communion used primarily to convey meaning? Certainly not! They fulfill a social function and that is their principal aim . . . to establish bonds of personal union between people.

If I had known this at the party, I would have emphatically responded to my friend rather than offer a simpering apology.

I also read (so you never have to) another classic paper in the field, “Universal and Culture-Specific Properties of Greetings,” published in 1997 in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology by Alessandro Duranti, former Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA. While accepting Maslinowski’s basic premise that greetings often are not genuine requests for information, Duranti showed that in certain cultures, they can in fact convey real information, define social relationships, and call for substantive answers, even if they seem ritualized.

For example, in the Samoan culture, the common greeting O fea e te alu i ai? (“Where are you going?”) may be used in place of a simple “hello,” but unlike the English “How are you?”, the answer is expected to convey meaningful information about activities, obligations, and even social position.

There are similar patterns in other cultures, according to various studies. In West Africa, the Wolof greeting of Nanga def? (“How are you?”) may be followed by further inquiries about one’s family, health, or household, each requiring a response as a way of confirming social ties and current circumstances.

In Chinese, a traditional greeting such as Chī le ma? (“Have you eaten?”) functions as a polite opening while also referring to a concrete matter of daily life and expressing a genuine concern about a person’s well-being. In Japan, the expression Otsukaresama desu (“You must be tired”) is a formal greeting at work but also acknowledges the other person’s effort and role.

Among the Zulu people in South Africa, the traditional greeting Sawubona is translated as “I see you,” with the reply meaning “I am here” — an exchange that operates as a form of mutual recognition, not just a polite conversation starter.

And the Maasai of East Africa are known to spit in their palms before a handshake as a gesture of respect, as saliva is thought to bring good fortune.

I’ll stick with, “Hi there. Nice day if it don’t rain.”

4) Off the Charts

Readers of this column know I’m a big fan of using graphics to convey information in my personal life as well as professional endeavors. 1 I’m proud of these efforts, although I realize they will never earn me a place in the Milestones Project — a veritable hall of fame for statistical graphics and data visualization from the 1600s to present.

Below is one slice of the project’s remarkable interactive timeline, from roughly the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. Click on a button, and you’ll learn, for instance, that in 1982, George Rorick developed the colorful USA Today weather map.

You can also learn about William Playfair, “the bad boy of bar charts,” which he invented in 1786, along with the line graph, followed by the pie chart in 1801, among other groundbreaking achievements in data graphics. His simultaneous involvement in a life of intrigue, scandal, indebtedness, and fraud raises the question of whether Playfair’s name is an aptonym or inaptonym.

What surprised me is that the voluminous Milestones Project does not include a reference to Harvey Poppel who, as head of the IT practice at Booz Allen Hamilton in the 1970s, is said to have introduced “Harvey Balls” — ideograms widely used by consultants for visual communication of qualitative information. (A version of them was used by the old Consumer Reports magazine to compare and rate products.)

I actually wrote to the director and co-creator of the Milestones Project, Michael Friendly, to ask if I had missed the entry for Poppel, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of pictographers.

Dr. Friendly, who also is co-author of A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication, humbly replied that he wasn’t aware of Harvey Balls and would update his database.

When that joyous day arrives, I will celebrate by donning this hat, which I bought from (I kid you not) the Harvey Balls Merch Store during my career in business strategy.

3) Check Your Bathing Suit

“Scientists Create Robots Smaller Than a Grain of Sand,” according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. The article described research by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan who have created the world’s smallest, fully programmable, autonomous robots, which can “swim” in liquid environments.

These teensy bots could one day advance medicine by monitoring the health of individual cells and retrieving tissue samples. They could also revolutionize manufacturing by constructing tiny devices such as computer chips with intricate circuitry.

Fantastic Voyage, anyone?

Left: A microrobot, fully integrated with sensors and a computer, small enough to balance on the ridge of a fingerprint. (Credit: University of Pennsylvania) Right: A poster from the 1966 American science fiction adventure film about a submarine crew who are shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair a brain injury. The movie was directed by Richard Fleischer, who also helmed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and the dystopian mystery-thriller Soylent Green (1973).

2) Sidetracks

• Nureyev!: Audiences might be disappointed to learn that Jerry Seinfeld, puffy shirt and all, will be the principal male dancer in the upcoming ballet production of Romeo and Juliet at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. Coming soon to the Comédie-Française: Sue Ellen Mischke starring as Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac.

See for yourself in this 50-second trailer.

• Without Ever Leaving Your Couch: Click on Bird Radio to hear calls from around the world.

• Neologism of the Week: A squircle is a shape somewhere between a square and a circle, widely recognized as the shape of an iPhone app icon.

• He’d Have a Field Day with This Column: I just discovered a Substack called “A Word About. . .” by Benjamin Dreyer, former executive managing editor and copy chief at Random House, whom The New York Times once described as the "style-arbiter-of-last-resort." From a recent post:

• Figures of Speech:“Dutch,” a subscriber from Washington, D.C., referred me to a list of 31 rhetorical devices collected by Miriam-Webster. Some examples:

• Antanaclasis: The repetition of a word within a phrase or sentence in which the second occurrence utilizes a different and sometimes contrary meaning from the first, e.g., “ We must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

• Dysphemism: The substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one, e.g., greasy spoon is a dysphemism for the word diner.

• Epistrophe: The repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect, e.g., “ of the people, by the people, for the people.”

• And my longtime favorite — Litotes: An understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary, e.g., not a bad singer, he’s no saint, no small feat, not the sharpest tool in the shed, she’s no fool.

• Paging Mr. Dreyer: Can you please confirm that this is the proper form of the plural possessive: “The litotes’ meanings are easy to miss.”

1) Life is Like a Test Tube of Chocolates

Disease, climate change, and poor farming practices are causing a shortage of cocoa, the essential ingredient of chocolate. With demand seemingly endless (humans consume more than seven million metric tons of chocolate per year, according to The Guardian), prices are soaring.

Enter the emerging field of lab-grown chocolate, cultured from plant cells. The Economist reported last year that Meiji, a Japanese confectioner, has backed California Cultured, an American start-up that is developing lab-grown cocoa for use in sweets, beverages, and ice cream. The company is awaiting regulatory approval.

In the meantime, New Scientist published this first-hand tasting account in an article titled, “Inside the Mouth-Watering Race to Master Lab-Grown Chocolate”: “It is by far the rarest and most exclusive chocolate I have ever eaten. In fact, you can’t even buy it in shops. It doesn’t look that special, though — just a few flattened droplets a slightly lighter shade than most dark chocolate, sealed in a tiny plastic bag. It smells like dark chocolate and tastes like it, too, but better — less bitter. Most of all, for me, there is no doubt that this is the real thing.”

I’d like a quarter pound of Impossible Cocoa, please.

California Cultured lab-grown chocolate ( New Scientist)