I was meeting someone new for coffee. He’d come via a mutual friend and was starting a new career in his mid-50s that overlapped with mine. For 50-plus years, I’ve been more willing than most to meet with job-seekers because…you just never know where the conversation will go. So we met at a Starbucks on Bloor.
He’d e-mailed me his resume and I’d dutifully looked him up on LinkedIn so I wouldn’t have to waste time during our meeting by asking basic questions. I noticed he’d held a senior job at a company where one of my best friends had been the CEO before moving on.
After our usual unpleasantries about the Toronto weather, I said all bright-eyed that I was great friends with this other man who he must know as well because they must have worked together.
“He fired me,” said my coffee-mate across the table.
“I know I should be more professional and just nod and smile and say ‘Yes, I know him’ and move on, but I must tell you…I don’t trust a word he says.”
Well, there we sat for what seemed like an infinity, but was likely five seconds. “Oh,” I said. “Well, you’re honest.” I didn’t need to jot in my memory “WTF with this guy?!” And later that day when I asked my great friend about the man I had coffee with, he felt the same way and made no bones about it either.
I was torn, because during the hour we spent together over coffee I ended up quite liking this man, despite his opening words. In fact, since then, we’ve become friends ourselves and I have put him into that category of friends with an asterisk to be sure I never invite him to something I also invite the person they loathe, to attend as well.
We all have such friendships, but most of the time, we don’t need such bluster to convey or betray our feelings about someone. The problem is, being professional and saying: “Yes, sure I know him,” without a smile or a story or any sense of anything is the most obvious Tell of all.
Indeed, this happened twice this week: I asked an arts administrator if she knew Soann So. She said: “Of course. Who doesn’t?” Followed by silence. Which spoke volumes and we moved on.
At another encounter, just to make it clear where I stood, I said to someone I was meeting for the first time who succeeded an old friend in a job…“And I assume you know my great friend Sutch Andsuch?”
All it took was half a second’s delay in his saying: “Oh sure,” then silence, for me to know exactly what he felt. Half a second.
Now while the person who actually told me he disliked one of my best friends is incredibly rare, the other social transactions I’ve just described happen millions of times a day in thousands of dialects around the world.
Yet despite this, and the fact that such verbal dexterity is an ability virtually all adults have – to say one thing in order to preserve civility, yet convey something entirely different – I started to wonder why there is no word, at least in English, to explain this particular form of ineffective camouflage.
There’s antiphrasis (Greek for “opposite words”), but when was the last time you used that?
In the days before AI, I would have spent a couple of hours trying to come up with a new word to describe this old and universally acknowledged behaviour. But we’re in the days of AI now, so I asked Perplexity to give me 10 new words that describe this, which it did in a couple of seconds. I won’t bore you with the so-so ones, like “thinflect” or “submire” and give you my favourite…which is “Nuanchem, the chemistry of sensing what someone feels but won’t articulate.”
So, let me introduce my new Word of the Year, “Nuanchem” ( “New-an-kem”) which we can all use on our Nuanchums old and new.
Meanwhile…
1. Best in show. A Doberman Pinscher named Penny was top dog at the 150th Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden this week. We are not Dog People, but every year we stumble across news that The Dog Show is on, and we spend one night riveted to the TV. Go Fido! Penny is co-owned by Theresa Connors‑Chan, an investment adviser with RBC Dominion Securities, and her husband Greg Chan, from Newtonville, outside Toronto.
Speaking of Best in Show, the wonderful Catherine O’Hara starred in the eponymous 2000 mockumentary, alongside Eugene Levy and Fred Willard.
2. Other Animal Impulses…especially these birds just living their lives. And…what big tentacles you have. Plus how to draw a horse and let it run free.
3. Room for just three more couples. If you’re looking for a short, intense brain squeeze and soul refresh at summer’s end. Join us for The Canada Summit, Aug. 30-Sept. 3 in the Canadian Rockies. Details here.
4. The world’s first trillionaire. Scott Galloway’s weekly newsletter about the markets notes: “If SpaceX does an IPO at $1.5 trillion, Bloomberg estimated that this will increase Elon’s net worth to $950 billion. According to Kalshi, the probability that he will become a trillionaire in the next year is 74%, making his net worth equal to 3% of America’s GDP. At the peak of the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller’s wealth amounted to 2% of America’s GDP…”
Speaking of Elon Musk, weeks after his company AI GROK was chastised for flooding the internet with nonconsensual fake images of naked women, it’s still doing the same withimages of men.
5. Not every free soloist is free. Alex Honnold isn’t the rule; he’s the exception. Paul Sagar is a free soloist who fell and is now a tetraplegic. Here’s his story. And for a different kind of stupidity, the Yodogo hijackers were Best in Class.
6. Smart people aren’t omniscient. Especially very rich ones. Plus the battle to stop clever people from betting, and ambitious Chinese military leaders from flying too close to the sun.
Also, it pains me to say this because Dr. Peter Attia says important and timely things about living longer and better. But it turns out he was with Jeffrey Epstein when his son was fighting for his life in hospital. Dr. Elaine Chin called out Attia’s bad behaviour for what it is.
The Epstein Effect is spelled out here by Melinda Gates.
7. David Brooks leaves a big hole. The Toronto-raised New York Times columnist is moving on, and his farewell essay speaks to times gone by and maybe to come. He notes in leaving: “Trump is that rare creature, a philistine who understands the power of culture. He put professional wrestlers onstage at the last Republican convention for a reason: to lift up a certain masculine ideal. He’s taken over the Kennedy Center for a reason: to tell a certain national narrative. Unfortunately, the culture he champions, because it is built upon domination, is a dehumanizing culture.”
8. The age of reversing our age…has begun. Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup founded by Harvard professor, David Sinclair, has won FDA approval to proceed with the first targeted attempt at age reversal in human volunteers. The denizens of longevity technology have been waiting for this moment for years.
9. Adding the Beckhams to my attention span. I didn’t pay much heed to them, the same way the Kardashians hold no charms for me. But last week’s break between the Beckham family and their son was positively Oedipal. Then I learn who young Brooklyn’s father-in-law is, and… it may be time to start following this new Succession battle.
10. This writing about coke will make you high. A splendidly evocative essay on days past. Plus why The Ode to Joy is such bangers. Plus, what rare books are getting at auction these days. And finally, Dance by Ricky Ubeda.
11. Budapest Plays Toronto. Next Thursday, Feb. 12, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, one of the Top 10 Best in the World, performs the monumental Mahler 3rd Symphony at Koerner Hall. You can score tickets with a 20% discount using this discount code: RAMSAY20