Communicating with the tribe

Language, accents, history, idiosyncrasy's are all the mental food we need when we make a phone call to an old friend especially if that friend is from back home. Its amazing how we seem to plug into some sort of special glucose which feeds our persona when we talk to one of our own tribe. The tribal affiliation is at its strongest when you are far from the tribe, when an accent or a piece of shared tribal humour triggers warm memories and melts the normal barriers we erect to people in general.
I have just come off the phone speaking to a 91 year old lady in Yorkshire. We didn't talk about things of high consequence but we had an instinctive trust in each other to enjoy the experience in a way that, outside the tribe one rarely feels. It seems to me that this none educational collegiate experience is so rich in what it tells us about our personalities, the way we familiarise ourselves with people from our own background. What this does is to open up the dialogue, make the innuendo acceptable, clarifies a figure of speech as a password both to background and culture. Relax and reminisce, the words and memories tumble out enriching our limited social vocabulary into a familiar sense of belonging.             

http://twocents2012.blogspot.com.au/