Brits and the long goodbye
This post is dedicated to Mike Wrotniak, an American living in London who drew my attention to this phenomenon.
How do you end a conversation with someone? Most of us probably assume that this is a straightforward process. A conversation winds down and both parties say ‘goodbye’ – or some variant thereof – bringing the conversation to its natural end.
At the risk of stoking social anxiety in readers, nothing could be further from the truth.1 As conversational analysts have shown, what we imagine to be a simple, straightforward and, above all, natural process is actively accomplished rather than something that happens in its own right. To quote Emanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks,
‘One cannot treat it as a routine to be run through, inevitable in its course once initiated. Rather, it must be viewed, as much conversation as a whole, as a set of prospective possibilities opened up at various points in the conversation’s course… Getting to a termination, therefore, involves work at various points in the course of the conversation and of the closing section; it requires accomplishing.’
As anyone who has ever dealt with cold calls from scammers and Virgin Mobile sales reps will know,2 left to its own devices, a conversation might never end, because the cooperation of both parties is required for what Schegloff and Sacks call a ‘terminal closure’ – unless, that is, you’re simply prepared to hang up (or leave) mid-conversation. This makes conversational closings even more fraught than conversational openings, which, as I’ve previously discussed in relation to the English tendency to open conversations with ‘Alright?’, entail their own challenges.
To facilitate the process of conversational closure, most languages have some sort of conventional farewell. For example, in Korean, a standard closure for in-person conversations is either annyeonghi gaseyo or annyeonghi gyeseyo – basically, ‘go well’ or ‘stay well’ (literally, ‘go peacefully’ and ‘stay peacefully’), depending on who is doing the staying and who is doing the leaving, although you might up the ante to annyeonghi gasipsio or annyeonghi gyesipsio in a formal setting.
However, phone calls are somewhat different – probably because the speaker traditionally had no idea who they were speaking to and the correct form of address to use. While yeoboseyo (basically, ‘hello’) is the usual opener, there isn’t a standard closer, and conversations tend to end on a drawn out ‘yes’ (ne), which makes things rather confusing for foreigners with dodgy language skills.
But conversations typically3 involve a number of signals that the conversation is winding down prior to the initiation of formal farewells. These are what Schegloff and Sacks call ‘pre-closures’. For English speakers, one party will generally say something like ‘we-ell’, ‘so-oo’ or ‘ok-aay’, thereby passing on their chance to introduce a new topic of conversation and illustrating their desire to move the conversation along. If the other party echoes this response, they’ve both signalled to each other that the conversation is winding down and goodbyes are now in order.
Alternatively, it’s common for one party to propose a closing in relation to the other party’s interests, in what amounts to a subtle (and occasionally blatant) gesture of fake altruism.4 ‘I’ll let you go’ is a good example of this, because it’s the speaker who wants to exit the conversation, but they couch it as if the other party does and they are merely being considerate.
Another tried and tested formula identified by Schegloff and Sacks is credible (but frequently made-up) excuses like ‘the baby’s crying’, ‘there’s someone at the door’, ‘the pot’s boiling over on the stove’, ‘reception’s bad’, and so on. Nevertheless, at any point in the closing process – including the moments after a final ‘goodbye’ – there are possibilities for reopening the conversation.
We’ve all been there. Maybe we’re talking to a Chatty Cathy and think we’ve just managed to extricate ourselves with a brisk farewell when she reopens the conversation with a comment or a question that we’re compelled to respond to, as in, ‘Oh, I just remembered your blood test. Did you get the results back yet?’ or ‘Say, did you end up applying for that promotion?’ Or maybe we’re in that cringeworthy phase of a new relationship where we simply can’t bear to part from our beloved and so there are endless rounds of ‘You didn’t hang up!’, ‘You hang up first’, ‘No, you hang up first’, ‘No, silly, you hang up first’, ‘Okay, let’s both hang up together’.5
Still, despite their potential perils, for the most part, conversational closings are an exercise most of us seamlessly engage in multiple times a day without any particular angst or friction. Unless, of course, you’re British. For if you are British, you are likely to have a rather peculiar variant of conversational closing – what I shall call here the long goodbye. Not to be confused with what’s often called the ‘Southern goodbye’ (a protracted parting common in the American South lasting a good half an hour), what differentiates a British goodbye is the fact that the parties actually want to end the conversation but do so in an excruciatingly protracted fashion.
To my shame, I must confess that until recently I had not noticed the distinctive features of the British long goodbye, although I immediately recognised it when it was brought to my attention. I blame the fact that until my new job, few of my colleagues were British. Nor did I have much cause to speak to Brits on the phone:6 the context in which the trait becomes most obvious.
In hindsight, I did notice the tendency of my former British colleagues to say multiple ‘byes’ during those excruciating Zoom socials everybody had during Covid, but at the time I assumed it was because they were saying individual goodbyes to everyone on the call (which I found odd but not particularly noteworthy). More recently, I had registered that our pilates teacher always says at least five goodbyes as she’s ushering us out the door, but I didn’t put two and two together that this was actually a thing. But to quote Rob Temple, one ‘very British problem’ is ‘having to say the word “bye” at least three times when hanging up the telephone, getting quieter with each one’ – a topic that was later featured in the TV series of the same name.
As the comedians interviewed highlight, British goodbyes have a couple of distinct features. First, they tend to get stuck in the pre-closure phase, with interminable rounds of ‘we-ll’, ‘so-oo’, ‘ok-aay’, ‘I’ll let you go’ and ‘I should be going’. Second, once the terminal closure phase is reached, the ‘byes’ begin – and then don’t end until the speaker literally hangs up the phone (or shuts the door in your face). These features of the British goodbye7 are even more clearly illustrated by the Scotsman Arjan Ken in his ‘Get English Tips’ series on YouTube.
So what on earth is going on with Brits not being able to efficiently end a conversation? While Very British Problems highlights the problem, it doesn’t explain it, although the TV show seems to chalk it up to what the anthropologist Kate Fox refers to as the core English trait of social dis-ease. In her words, this is:
‘our lack of ease, discomfort and incompetence in the field (minefield) of social interaction; our embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, emotional constipation and general inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings’.
While awkwardness, social discomfort and perverse obliqueness presumably account for some of the inability to hang up efficiently, it’s the combination of the trait of social dis-ease with politeness norms that seems to cause problems.
This aspect of the long goodbye is highlighted in a Reddit thread titled ‘Why is it we Brits say “Bye” at least 12 times when ending a call?’, where one commenter theorises that,
‘I think it’s partly because formal good byes would go on for ever so just creating a wall of byes overrides all that without being rude. Like, rather than try and navigate the complexity of signing off a call just say bye repeatedly until the potential awkwardness has passed’.
Similarly drawing attention to the fear of appearing rude, another commenter points to the possibility of feedback loops in which people get stuck saying goodbyes. She speculates, ‘Do we need to hear the “bye” back or else it is rude (?) in which case we must respond and repeat and risk getting stuck – or choose to head it off with a hundred “goodbyes” in a row before getting sucked into the cycle?’
What these commenters have intuited (rightly, I think) is that the ‘wall’ of goodbyes so characteristic of British farewells is the solution to the problem of the pre-closure phase and the fear of getting stuck there.8 It operates in much the same way as manually turning off a broken record that is otherwise set on endless repeat – or where you live in perpetual fear that this might happen. Put differently, the wall of goodbyes politely accomplishes the closure of the conversation for a people highly attuned to the intrinsic awkwardness of this process, but not confident in their skills of getting there more directly.
So if you live in the UK, you basically have two options. You’ll either need to learn to love the long goodbye, or you can take a more proactive stance and just hang up or leave as soon as it starts, with a firm ‘goodbye’ as you make your exit. In fact, you’ll be doing them a favour because that is exactly what the other person wants. After all, the wall of goodbyes is basically code for ‘for the love of god, let’s end this now’. And who knows? Maybe it will catch on. After all, if Brits managed to learn ‘No worries’ from watching Australian soap operas9 then it’s surely possible to train them in a more confident and efficient goodbye.
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Quite frankly, after reading the work of conversational analysts like Harvey Sacks, I have a mild case of it myself. It makes you realise it’s a miracle that conversations ever happen – or, at least – ever end.
This is presumably not a problem that young people ever experience, given that, as Zoe Williams notes, the circumstances in which a phone call is acceptable are ‘almost never, and only with prior written assent’.
I say ‘typically’ because I know various people (cough, Tim Bell, cough) who abruptly end conversations when they are finished with them, providing virtually no warning before they hang up.
For the record, this is my exact strategy when I feel that guests have outstayed their welcome – which, for the record, generally means any time after 9pm.* ‘You look tired’, I’ll say, or ‘You must have an early start tomorrow, so feel free to leave whenever it suits you’. Given the relatively early time I start making such statements, I often get responses like ‘No, I’m not tired at all’, or ‘I’m fine. I’ve got the day off tomorrow’, leading to more elaborate statements of fake altruism to get them to leave, like ‘Do you want me to check the transit schedule for you?’ ‘The trains run pretty infrequently at night and Ubers are really expensive’, etc. If they don’t get the hint, at this point, Andrew says something like ‘She wants you to leave’. People then laugh on the presumption that he’s joking, so he has to explain, ‘No, really. She keeps granny hours and wants to go to bed’.
*Okay, 8.30pm.
Does this still happen with the young’uns, given their allergy to phone calls? Is there a texting equivalent to ‘you hang up first!’, ‘no, you hang first’? Inquiring minds want to know.
Well, except to hang up on them in the case of those persistent bastards at Virgin Mobile.
Initially, I thought this might be a specifically English phenomenon, but Arjan Ken’s clip suggests that it’s a pan-British thing. That said, as many Scots don’t refer to themselves as Brits, it’s entirely possible that he’s using ‘British’ as a synonym for ‘English’, so the jury is still out on how far the trait extends across the island.
In the early noughties, there appears to have been a brief flirtation with ‘laters’ as a substitute farewell, which had the advantage of brevity but never really caught on (except when used ironically), because it made the speaker sound like a complete nob.
How Americans picked it up from Australians remains a mystery, although they tend to treat as a synonym for ‘you’re welcome’, thereby completely misusing it.
> Does this still happen with the young’uns, given their allergy to phone calls? Is there a texting equivalent to ‘you hang up first!’, ‘no, you hang first’? Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm a Gen Xer, but I've done a bit of field research with the natives of Gen Z, and my observations indicate that conversations via text often never really begin or end. Although there may sometimes be "I have to go" and "see you," often they simply move with more or less formality, and more or less immediacy, moment by moment by moment.