How to One-Up Your Colleagues: Plonking
Last week, I included a passage on what humorist Stephen Potter coined The Canterbury Block, a tool to befuddle an expert, even when you know little about her field. The key to success in this gambit, according to Potter, is one’s tone. He calls it “plonking.”
The excerpt below is also from Potter’s 1955 book Lifesmanship. I’m sure you’ll easily recognize how to apply this technique in your next meeting to trip up your corporate nemesis.
What is Plonking?
If you have nothing to say, or, rather, something extremely stupid and obvious, say it, but in a “plonking” tone of voice—ie. roundly, but hollowly and dogmatically. It is possible, for instance, to take up and repeat with slight variation, in this tone of voice, the last phrase of the speaker. Thus:
TYPOGRAPHY EXPERT: …and roman lower-case letters of Scotch and Baskerville have two or three thou. more breadth, which gives a more generous tone, an easier and more spacious colour, to the full page—
YOURSELF: The letters “have width.”
T. E.: Exactly, exactly, exactly—and then if—
YOURSELF: It is a widening.
T. E.: What?—Oh yes, yes.
This is the lightest of trips, yet, if properly managed, the tone of voice will suggest that you can afford to say the obvious thing, because you have approached your conclusion the hard way, through a long apprenticeship of study.
“Plonking” of a kind can be made by the right use of quotation or pretended quotation. Here is the rough format:
MILITARY EXPERT (Beginning to get into his stride, and talking now really well): There is, of course, no precise common denominator between the type of mind which, in matters of military science, thinks tactically, and the man who is just an ordinary pugnacious devil with a bit of battlefield instinct about him.
YOURSELF (Quietly plonking): Yes, ... “Where equal mind and contest equal go.”
This is correct quotation plonking (a) because it is not a genuine quotation and (b) because it is meaningless. The Military Expert must either pass it over, smile vaguely, say “yes,” or in the last resort, “I don’t quite get…” In any case, it stops flow, and suggests that whatever he is saying, you got there first.
Thanks for reading!
Charles
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