ANYWHERE NICE?

So, it’s properly holiday time for the British. For some reason, this is the week that a lot of people I know seem to be packing up their things and heading off on vacation.

That’s led to quite a few examples of a really odd but very familiar-looking question.

“Going anywhere nice?”

Which really means (I think):

“Where are you going?”

… but is a much less intrusive way of asking it. After all, ‘holiday destination’ seems to fall into the grey area between private and public information, and I don’t think anyone’s quite certain what the rules are.

Anywhere nice? then, becomes a fishing question, designed to extract a location, while also giving the holidaymaker an opt-out if they don’t feel like telling their colleagues (who, let’s face it, they are literally getting away from) where they’ll be.

“Anywhere nice?”

“Yep.”

There’s a weird thing going on in the subtext. An open question (where are you going?) is masked by a closed one (anywhere nice?). 

But… typically a closed question is more aggressive than an open one, isn’t it? If I force you to answer yes or no, you’ll feel under far more pressure than a lovely open-ended talk-at-length question. Not here. Here, a closed question is giving you the freedom to duck out of the conversation altogether.

This happens a lot in English.

“How are you doing? Everything okay?”

… feels like a very normal, friendly approach to a person’s day. Actually, once again we’ve given them all the tools they need to be either completely open…

“Oh man, wait till I tell you what happened. I’ve never been so…”

… or shut…

“Yeah, it’s been okay.”

This dance of open and closed questions happens all the time. We use it to subconsciously judge a relationship, pick the route to the next thing to say, or how we can get this person to like us. Anywhere nice? is just an example of it. I thought about this for a while, mostly because my pedantry just doesn’t let me ask the anywhere-nice question. Instead, in a method I’ve never really thought about before, I think I actually ask:

“Where are you off to?”

… presumably because my brain has calculated that that's a more honest way of asking what I really want to be nosy about. Nobody’s yet said, “None of your business,”  but now that I think about it, there have been some awkward smiles and some shuffles. So maybe I'm wrong.

“I don’t want to jinx it,” said someone this morning, beaming, “Every time I’ve said it, the restrictions change, so I’m not going to say.”

I don’t mind people asking me by the way. It’s not private information. It’s actually quite pleasant when you get back and people have remembered where you’ve been.

Alas, it’s not my turn to jet off into the sunset. That seems to be everyone else today, whooping and hollering away from the stress and exhaustion that remains here, hoping of course that when they get there, when the plane lands or the brakes squeal into the hotel car park, they’ll be anywhere other than here; anywhere nice.