Describe how these interactions went when you breached this particular social norm. What happened? How did your interlocutors react? What did they say?

In the 1950s and 60s, Harold Garfinkel (an ethnomethodologist) famously had his students perform a variety of what he called ‘breaching experiments’. These were little experiments where experimenters (i.e., Garfinkel’s students) would purposefully mess around with some social norm. For example, they would get into an elevator and face the wrong direction; or they would try to bargain for a cheaper price at the grocery store as if it were an open-air market. Student-experimenters would then record what happened when they violated social norms in this way.
For this Extra Credit exercise, you yourself will be breaking a norm that has to do with language usage. Specifically, what you’ll do is consistently ask for clarification and greater specificity from someone. For instance, your friend might announce to you “Hey, I got a flat tire today”. Rather than responding as you normally might, ask for clarification instead: “What do you mean by a ‘flat tire’?”. Then, after they explain a bit (e.g., “Oh, like I must have run over a nail or something”), ask for clarification and greater specificity again (e.g., “What do you mean you ‘ran over a nail’?” or “What do you mean by a ‘nail’?”). Continue this for a couple of rounds, and see what happens. Try it with a few different people.
Describe how these interactions went when you breached this particular social norm. What happened? How did your interlocutors react? What did they say? What does this breaching experiment reveal about language use? What is/are the social norm(s) governing language usage that are being ‘violated’ by this experiment?

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