Your host didn't expect to have two posts on Language and the Law so close together, but shortly after commenting on the definition of "cruising", he received a telemarketing call from his suddenly endangered provider of television programming, DirecTV.
Scott Adams penned a characteristically biting Dilbert on this point some time ago. In the first panel, Dilbert is eating dinner when the phone rings. The caller informs him that he's from the local phone company, and asks if it's a bad time to call. Dilbert says "no". The strip concludes with the caller hanging up, saying, "Oh, then we'll try again later".
It was because this was so typical of the telemarketing attitude -- not to mention the insidious autodialers which leave people saying "hello? hello?" before the lazy bum on the other end notices that the phone has been picked up and starts his pitch -- that Congress saw fit to do this. However, the law explicitly excluded businesses with which people already had existing relationships (not to mention political campaigns, although SC has an anecdote about that for later).
Official SC policy in handling these situations is to allow the caller enough time to identify themselves and make it clear that they are reading from a script. Upon confirmation of this fact, your host informs the caller that he strictly refuses to buy the products of any company which markets to him in such an intrusive fashion, and that if they do not immediately take him off their marketing lists, and then hang up, his next order will be a service cancellation. This strategy has never yet failed to produce the desired result, although SC was once stunned into silence by AOL's strategy of waiting for him to call technical support, who then launched into a sales pitch for additional services before handling the issue at hand.
Obviously, this sort of testiness is not especially fair to people who are merely carrying out decisions made at a much higher level of management, a point which several readers have made in these pages before. SC would defend himself in this regard by noting that these people have willingly accepted jobs where harrassing people is the point, and not a mere incident of their larger job function.
However, stepping back from the matter of individuals for a second, the debate over telemarketing is merely one symptom of a larger issue, the question of what society considers polite discourse. The argument is sometimes advanced that the law is merely a codification of existing values, but in this case, SC thinks that it's only true in an ironic sense. It is specifically because notions of restraint and politeness are no longer widely shared that what had previously been common sense has become grounds for legislation. Generally, when conversing with others in person, we do not exchange copies of written rules governing what we might say, and when we might say it. This sort of knowledge is just assumed to be well-known and commonly understood, resulting in a lack of documentation. Perhaps we are engaging in the development of the ultimate proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: rather than encoding our discourse rules in the grammar of the language, as politeness markers or sentence constructions, we'll be the first culture to encode them in our legal system.
UPDATE: Perhaps SC should be grateful that he's a DirecTV subscriber.
(Edited at 9:05 P.M. on 3/9/03 to include update material.)
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