Mr Mummu and the Urge to Finish Other People's Sentences

Last week my wife started telling me about a conversation she'd had at work. "So then my manager said I should just," she began, and I was already there. "Push back on the deadline," I said, pleased with myself.

She stopped. "No. She said I should stop apologising so much."

That was the actual sentence, and it was a better one than mine. It had a small hurt in it and a small win, and I'd stepped on both. She told me the rest anyway, because she's kind, but the story had lost a bit of air. I'd turned up at the end of her thought with the wrong parcel.

I've finished other people's sentences for as long as I can remember. At family dinners growing up, in rooms full of Telugu and English and three conversations at once, it felt like the price of entry. If you waited for a clean gap you'd be waiting until the rice went cold. So I learned to jump in. For years I counted it as a sign of attention, proof I was following closely enough to guess the ending.

Lately I'm less sure.

Why the urge is so strong

Part of it is plain speed. In 2009 a team of conversation researchers led by Tanya Stivers recorded people chatting in ten languages, from Japanese and Danish to small languages spoken in Papua New Guinea and Namibia. In every one of them, the most common gap between a question and its answer sat within about 200 milliseconds. That's quicker than most of us can put a reply together from scratch, which means we're building our answer while the other person is still talking. A listening brain is a guessing brain. Predicting the ending is the machinery doing its normal job.

The linguist Deborah Tannen gave the friendly version of this a name: cooperative overlap. Some people, she found, talk along with a speaker to show enthusiasm. They chime in and finish phrases as a way of saying "I'm with you". She called them high involvement speakers. Others, whom she called high considerateness speakers, wait their turn and feel trampled when someone doesn't. Neither style is wrong. Trouble starts when the two meet and each reads the other as rude or cold.

So I'm a high involvement speaker, raised in high involvement rooms. Fine. That explains the habit. It doesn't explain the times it goes wrong, like my wife's manager and the apology that had nothing to do with deadlines.

When I'm honest about those times, the urge runs on a few different engines. Sometimes I finish because the pause makes me uncomfortable and I want it gone. Sometimes I finish to show I'm clever, which is a performance with an audience of one. And sometimes, the worst version, I finish because I've already decided what the other person feels and I'd like to skip ahead to the part where I respond. Warmth leans in. Those other engines grab the steering wheel while the driver is still mid sentence.

A lesson over the fence

Mr. Mummu, who lives a few houses down from us, once explained his own method to me over the fence. "I have a system," he said. "First half of the sentence I listen. Second half I already know."

One spring a new neighbour, a quiet man still unpacking boxes, came over and said, "I was wondering if you could..." Mummu was off before the verb landed. He came back with a ladder. The man opened his mouth, so Mummu fetched the wheelbarrow, then an extension cord, then his good spade. Four trips. He sat down on the upturned wheelbarrow, out of puff, and finally let the poor man speak.

"...come for dinner on Friday. I'm cooking for the whole street."

Mummu laughed when he told me. "Four trips," he said, "for an invitation that was already walking to my door."

I think about that wheelbarrow more than I'd like to admit. Mummu wasn't being rude. He was being generous at speed, and the speed meant his generosity answered a question nobody had asked. Most of my own sentence finishing looks like that: help, delivered early, to the wrong address.

Practice from unlikely places

Two people in my life have been quietly retraining me, neither of them on purpose.

My mum lives in India, and our video calls carry a small lag. When I jump in, we collide, both stop, both start again, and the call turns into a polite traffic jam. Over the years I've learned that if I simply wait one beat after she seems to finish, she nearly always has another line. Often it's the real one. "Everything is fine, kanna," she'll say, and then, after the lag, "only my knee is troubling a bit." That second sentence is the reason she rang. I'd have missed it every time if the internet had been faster.

Then there's our son, who is four months old and has recently discovered he has a voice. He coos and gurgles in long, earnest runs with the rise and fall of real speech. He pauses as if for effect. Nobody on earth can finish his sentences, me included, and on the couch at six in the morning I've noticed how much I enjoy that. There's no ending to guess. All I can do is listen, look interested, and answer when he stops. Child development researchers call this back and forth serve and return, and it turns out babies are rather good at teaching it.

To be fair to the habit, plenty of people like having their sentences finished. Among close friends it can feel like being known, and my wife says she likes it when I get the small things right, like the name of the actor she can't quite remember. I haven't stopped, and I'm not sure I should stop completely. The aim is to notice which engine is running.

What I'm practising now is small. When I feel the urge, I take one breath before speaking. If the other person carries on, I've heard something I would have trampled. If they don't, I've lost a second. On the days I remember, I swap my guess for two words: "And then?"

Those two words have done more for my marriage than any clever ending I've ever supplied. They hand the sentence back to the person it belonged to, which is usually where the best part was waiting.