Echowish

Echowish (n.) The reflex that returns a good wish to the person who just gave it, at full speed and with no inspection whatsoever, so that a waiter lowering a plate of something hot in front of you is warmly invited to enjoy his meal too.

The restaurant is the natural habitat. The plate comes down, the waiter says enjoy your meal, and before any part of you has considered whether the waiter is about to have a meal, your mouth has already said and you. There is then a small, clean silence of about half a second, in which everybody at the table understands exactly what has happened, and the waiter, who has heard it nine times already that evening, walks away with the grace of a professional.

The restaurant is only the classic case. Echowish roams widely. It tells the attendant tearing your ticket to enjoy the film. It wishes the dentist a pleasant appointment. It answers a shop assistant's have a lovely holiday with you too in mid-November, and it has been known to tell a flight attendant to have a good flight, which of all its works is perhaps the least unreasonable.

What follows is the interesting part, because there are only three exits and none of them is dignified. You can pretend it did not happen, which requires a level, unblinking calm that most people cannot produce while holding a fork. You can double down and say it again more warmly, as though you meant it as a general blessing on the hospitality trade. Or you can explain, which has never once worked, and which usually ends with a grown adult saying I meant, like, in general, to a person who left twenty seconds ago.

Connoisseurs recognise a rarer and more beautiful form, the mutual echowish, in which the other party is also running on reflex and answers you too to your you too. This is no longer an accident. This is two people saying pleasant nonsense to each other at close range, for no reason, in perfect harmony, and it is one of the warmest things that can happen between strangers.

The echowish is not a failure of attention, which is the strange thing about it. It happens most reliably to polite people who are paying attention to something else, and it happens fastest when the mood is good.

Behind the joke is a real and rather elegant bit of machinery. Conversation runs in pairs. A greeting wants a greeting, a thank you wants a you're welcome, a question wants an answer, and the second half of the pair is loaded and ready before the first half has finished arriving. What triggers it is largely the shape of the sentence, not its meaning, which is why the wrong one can go off. Your mouth recognised a good wish and returned one, and that was the whole calculation.

Which is, most of the time, a system working perfectly. The alternative is a world in which every have a nice day, sleep well and safe trip home has to be individually examined for logical fit before you answer, and nobody would get out of the door. A few hundred tiny courtesies a week run themselves so that you can think about something else. Once in a while one of them fires at the wrong target, a waiter is wished a pleasant dinner he is not having, and everyone survives it beautifully.