The Wit’s Guide to Tact

Or, don’t come get your cows

Voltaire upon rising at Ferney, dictating to his long-suffering but very tactful secretary Collini, Jean Huber, 1772

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves, goes one gloss on the subject. You want to make your guests feel at home, especially when you wish they were. You remember your friends’ birthdays but forget how old they are. And you tell your enemies to go to hell such that they look forward to the trip.

“Tact is, after all, a kind of mind reading.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett

So isn’t that just being polite? No, because being tactful is much more tactical than mere politesse. Done properly, it’s an almost superhuman ability to cut discomfort off at the pass. The classic example, as explained by Delphine Seyrig to her young lover in Francois Truffaut’s 1968 film Stolen Kisses, goes like this: “A visiting gentleman accidentally opens a bathroom door and discovers a woman completely nude. He quickly takes a step back, closes the door, and says, ‘Pardon, Madame!’ That is politeness. The same gentleman, pushing the same door, discovering the same completely naked woman, then says, ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ That is tact.”

“Tact is the art of recognizing when to be big and when not to belittle.”
— Dana Robbins

Hence, the wherewithal to immediately reassure the interrupted party that you saw nothing puts everyone at ease. And the corollary joke, which datedly assumed heterosexuality, concerns the young maid who interrupts newlyweds consummating their marriage and quickly exclaims, “Sorry, gentlemen!”

“Tact consists in knowing how far to go in going too far.”
— Jean Cocteau

Two prophets go before the sultan to read his fortunes. “You will see all your children die,” the first one says, and he is summarily executed. “You will live a long life, longer than all your children,” says the second prophet, who is rewarded with gold and riches.

“Tact is the art of convincing people that they know more than you do.”
— Raymond Mortimer

More proof that tact pays: Orlando Aloysius Battista, a renowned chemist and epigrammer, put himself through McGill University writing epigrams for the Saturday Evening Post. Each quip paid $10, which in the 1920s could buy 40 full-course dinners (“including some kind of English dessert”) at Montreal’s Clover Leaf Inn. Tact, Battista wrote, was the ability to step on a man’s toes without scuffing the shine on his shoes. To hammer home a point without hitting the other fellow’s thumb. To agree with someone and still convince him that he’s wrong. And it’s like air in an automobile tire; without it, driving through life will be rough going. Those four quips earned him $700 in today’s money.

“Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.”
— Howard W. Newton

A tactful way to help resolve disturbances caused by a lack of tact is the tact filter. On his MIT website in 1996, Jeff Bigler explained that because nerds were constantly teased in adolescence and told by their doting parents to ignore mean comments, they apply a “tact filter” on everything they hear to soften the blow. Thus, two poindexters can have a blunt conversation about pocket protectors without hurt feelings. Normies, on the other hand, invert their tact filter so that all outgoing statements are softened. And that’s why the two tribes have such difficulty communicating.

“Imagine life without the little lies — the social fibs that save us so much pain. Truth or tact? You have to choose. Most times they’re not compatible.”
— Eddie Cantor

A related concept is the BURP theory of expression, which states that all communicators must decide in which order to be Believed, Understood, Remembered, and Pleasurable. This is explained by the science fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin in the particular Ozark English situation of having to alert your neighbour to the fact their cows have wandered into your yard again.

The tactless and self-defeating thing to say is “Come get your cows”: Certainly understood, probably believed, likely remembered, not pleasurable — and thus, residents of this rural region of the U.S. aren’t likely to act.

Whereas the winning phrase — “Might could be you’d want to take a look out your east window toward my front yard” — gets an Understood, Pleasurable, Remembered, Believed, and thus action. As the Ozarkian linguist explains, it really means “Now, there’s a problem over here, and I’m not pleased, and we need to talk about it, and you need to fix it. But I want you to know that I am on your side and that I admire the way you look after your cows.” And that, in all dialects of English, is tact.

“In the battle for existence, talent is the punch and tact is the fancy footwork.”
— Wilson Mizner

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What better illustration of tact than Graham Roumieu’s Riposte Card, ever so gently illustrating the dance between comfort and discomfort? As Graham so politely requested, “Please put at least a couple of humorous watercolourists on whatever the giant planetary escape ship gets called.” I’m mailing out the January & February cards to paying subscribers this weekend and will slip this gem into the envelopes:

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“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”
— Samuel Butler

The French word for tact is delicatesse. The Germans took that word and made it delicatessen. And from that exchange, it is possible to extrapolate the entire history of Franco-German relations.

It wasn’t so much what Issue No. 291 of Get Wit Quick said but how it said it. Which is a chance to dredge up the old Russell’s Conjugation, through which the nasty side of a trait becomes more obvious the further away it gets: “I am tactful, you are wishy-washy; he is disingenuous.” The newsletter mascot is Magnus the Magpie, an intelligent bird who collects shiny things and who tactlessly took his name from the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. When people say tack when they mean tact, it’s tacky to be tactless. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck that will have you wondering, “Is subtle funk even funkier?” The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If you’ve read this far, might could be you’d want to tap the ❤️ on your way out.