Oscar Wilde never said that “conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
The other day, a colleague came by my desk to chat about the weather. The sky outside was dark and menacing, and the meteorologists, she told me with widening eyes, were predicting gale-force winds, a fact that we both found intriguing (what even qualifies as a gale?). We were having a perfectly nice conversation at the end of a long day, from my perspective. And then she ruined it. “Sorry,” she said. “I know talking about the weather is boring.”
Many innocent people around the world suffer from this misapprehension. We are taught that discussing the weather is the epitome of meaningless drivel and the mark of a poor conversationalist, the vocal equivalent of a sign declaring I am an uninteresting person. But this stigma is based on a simple analytical error. In the paradigmatic example, two people, perhaps sharing an elevator or waiting for a bus, find themselves at a loss for what to talk about, but feel compelled to fill the air. One of them says, “It’s supposed to rain tonight.” Is that a boring scenario? Perhaps, although I must say that I, for one, would be grateful to learn about the forecast. But let’s think about what’s really happening. The problem here is not that the weather is boring. The problem is that the people have nothing else to talk about, and once the topic of the evening’s precipitation is exhausted, the conversation will sputter out awkwardly. Perversely, the weather becomes the symbol of a limited conversational repertoire, when it was in fact the most interesting subject available.
The literature on talking-about-the-weather is not large, but authors who consider the matter almost invariably include a reference to the Oscar Wilde quote “Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” What Wilde actually said is that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, which is much more clever and has nothing to do with the weather. (In a letter toward the end of his life, Wilde also wrote, “The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.” A grim sentiment, but not the words of a weather-shamer.) The persistence of this apocryphal quote is telling: The speaker who misquotes Wilde is guilty of the very consistent lack of imagination supposedly displayed by us amateur meteorologists.
From the October 1955 issue: Weather or no
Let’s consider the possibility that people turn so incessantly toward weather talk because it is interesting—not Oscar Wilde’s–letters interesting, but not bad. We want to talk about the weather because it is on our minds, and it is on our minds because it matters. It determines how we dress, the plans we make, what we’ll cook for dinner, whether we catch that flight. It is erratic and mysterious. Today, photons blasted from a nearby star refract in the Earth’s atmosphere, projecting a dome of blue; tomorrow, invisible molecules of water vapor will condense overhead into microscopic ice crystals that coalesce into ethereal flakes and drift earthward. It’s magic. It affects our emotions more powerfully than most drugs. Bonding over a sunny day spreads joy. Commiserating over gloom builds solidarity. This is all to say nothing of the ever more palpable effects of climate change.
Weather talk can be boring, of course, as any subject can be in the wrong hands. But compared with what? In Berkeley, California, where I recently lived for two years, the weather is nice pretty much every day, which mostly eliminates it as a topic of conversation. Instead, people in the Bay Area will talk your ear off about the adventurous things they like to do in the nice weather—bike rides, camping trips, ayahuasca—which is actually quite boring. Who cares about someone else’s hobby? Maybe it’s not a coincidence that Californians are ever so slightly duller, on average, than East Coasters; what we lose in climate, we gain in personality.
When evaluating conversational topics, you have to consider the alternatives. If you’re not going to talk about the weather, what are you going to talk about? Your kids? Your dog? Are you sure that’s the gripping material you think it is? I’d much rather talk about how much snow is in store this weekend—the subject of a lively text thread I’m part of as I write this, it so happens—than hear about any of these supposedly not-boring subjects. Talking unapologetically about the heat or the cold or the humidity or the rain or the snow gets people animated. They have opinions. And this is the key to good small talk: It must be participatory. Going on about yourself is the surest way to be boring. The beauty of the weather is that it is inherently collective. If I’m hot and sweaty, you probably are too.
The stakes of this issue are higher than you might imagine. As my colleague Derek Thompson recently wrote, Americans are hanging out less and spending more time alone than at any point on record. This seems to have something to do with rising levels of depression and anxiety. The weather may be entrancing, but in our hearts there is no sun. In this context, the taboo against discussing the weather is not merely inane; it is a threat to public health. We must do whatever we can to encourage casual socializing, including tearing down artificial barriers to low-stakes chitchat. Go ahead and talk about the weather, for America’s sake.
The Weather Is Perfectly Interesting, Actually
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20.02.2024
Oscar Wilde never said that “conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
The other day, a colleague came by my desk to chat about the weather. The sky outside was dark and menacing, and the meteorologists, she told me with widening eyes, were predicting gale-force winds, a fact that we both found intriguing (what even qualifies as a gale?). We were having a perfectly nice conversation at the end of a long day, from my perspective. And then she ruined it. “Sorry,” she said. “I know talking about the weather is boring.”
Many innocent people around the world suffer from this misapprehension. We are taught that discussing the weather is the epitome of meaningless drivel and the mark of a poor conversationalist, the vocal equivalent of a sign declaring I am an uninteresting person. But this stigma is based on a simple analytical error. In the paradigmatic example, two people, perhaps sharing an elevator or waiting for a bus, find themselves at a loss for what to talk about, but feel compelled to fill the air. One of them says, “It’s supposed to rain tonight.” Is that a boring scenario? Perhaps, although I must say that I, for one, would be grateful to learn about the forecast. But let’s think about what’s really happening. The problem here is not that the weather is boring. The problem is that the people have nothing else to talk........
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