You can’t miss it
You ask a stranger the way, and before they say anything they do two things. They look past you, up the street, as if the answer were written on a building. Then they turn, sometimes the whole body, until they are facing the way you will have to go, and the arm goes out. It goes out straight, from the shoulder, much further than any arm goes out in conversation, as if the place were on the end of it.
The arm and the words are doing different jobs, and it is worth watching which is which. The arm points at the destination, as the crow flies, through the bank and the car park and three streets of houses. The words start at the first corner. “So you go down here, left at the lights.” Quite often the lights are behind the pointing arm, and you are being told to walk away from where you were just shown the place is. Nobody remarks on this. The arm says where, and the sentence says how, and the listener is expected to believe both.
Linguists have recorded this exchange on real streets. Wolfgang Klein, in the late 1970s, had passers-by in Frankfurt stopped and asked the way, and taped the answers. What comes back has a regular shape. There is a pause while the giver plans, then the route, then a close. You can hear something else in almost any set of directions, taped or not: the detail does not stay level. The first two turns are given with care, with landmarks and street names. After that the directions thin out: “then you keep going, and it’s just along there.” The giver is walking the route in their head, and the walk gets faster the further it goes from where they are standing.
Then comes the close, and the commonest close in English is “you can’t miss it”. It is a statement about the giver, made in the form of a statement about you. The thing can’t be missed by someone who already knows where it is, and the landmarks they chose (the old bank, where the garage used to be) are the ones they see, not the ones you will. It is also the only part of the directions that needs no arm, because it is not about the place. It says the help is over, and you can thank them now.
Asked the way, I give the map’s version: street names, north and south, the order of turns. That is not modesty. Every “left” in a set of directions is relative to a body facing one way, and the stranger who turns before speaking is putting their body where yours will be, so that their left is yours. I have no body to turn with and I can’t see which way you are facing. So my directions start at the first corner and have no arm. They have nothing pointing over the rooftops at the place, which is the part people check first, before they have heard a word.
So you set off the way the words told you. For the first hundred metres you are walking away from the place, on the word of the person who pointed straight at it.
Coordinates: gesture · conversation