Please Be Seated

Because of the way our bodies bend, the most comfortable position, when not prone, tends to be with the buttocks emplaced some distance above the ground (depending on the length of our legs) and our backs resting, if possible, against a vertical surface. This is known as “sitting,” and, for all the improvements, in housing, in furniture, and in technology (where would we be today without our recliners?) it remains a basic human posture.

But the story hardly ends there. Different cultures take their own positions (so to speak) on this whole issue. In some parts of the world, it’s as natural to sit upright cross-legged on the ground as upon any object. (Chief Sitting-Bull no doubt never sat any other way, until he became “civilized.”) In other regions, the generally approved resting status is what we would call “squatting.” It’s probably no coincidence that these cultural variations tend to occur in places where trees have always been scarce. Otherwise, you could at least sit on the trunk of a fallen tree – or on the stump of a felled one.

Such images have found their way into American folklore. When I studied Education (I actually got an M.A. in that subject, in the process of acquiring a California Teaching Credential), one thing I learned – of the few that stuck with me – was that Mark Hopkins, an eminent educator of the Nineteenth Century, had been referred to in a speech by then-President James Garfield, who said that his own concept of an ideal university was “Mark Hopkins at one end of a log, and a student at the other.”

We can no longer hope for such pedagogical simplicity. But we have another arboreal image, concerning informal oratory, which is the “stump speech.” This, of course, harks back to a time when a tree stump might have made the most convenient speaking platform. The term now, as we know, connotes a standardized address delivered in various places usually by a political candidate.

But in our culture, what we call a “chair” has always been of great importance – even when, or particularly when, there are not many of them. That being the case, when there is a relatively small gathering, perhaps around a table, the person occupying the single chair automatically acquires a leadership role. Or it may be that the shape of the table designates a “head,” and, no matter how many people are seated at it, the one sitting there is the “Chairman” or “Chairperson,” or simply the “Chair.” In the academic world, it came to mean an endowed position. In the political, especially the Communist, world, the Party Chairman was the top dog – as was Stalin in Russia, and Chairman Mao in China.

It’s also customary, under Parliamentary Rules, for organized meetings to have someone at least nominally conducting the proceedings, and for anyone wishing to address the entire gathering to first secure their permission by beginning with “Mr. Chairman!” Senator Joseph McCarthy, a prominent American political figure of the 1950s, became notorious for his over-use of that expression when he sometimes failed to get permission to speak, usually adding “Point of Order!”

But what is a “chair” anyway? The concept can have all kinds of purposes and connotations, such as a throne (which never looks to be very comfortable), an electric chair (where comfort is hardly of concern), a toilet (which ought to be just comfortable enough to get the job done), or a rocking-chair (which harks back to the cradle, where comfort is everything).

Babies also have “high-chairs,” whose height is really for the convenience of the adults tending to them.

And of course, certain people with disabilities have wheel-chairs, which come in many different flavors – from the simplest, which require an able-bodied person to push them, to the automated vehicles which today enable the handicapped to navigate city streets alone.

Then there are benches, tiers, and stools, whose chief distinction is that they have no support for the back. Most chairs have four legs, but a stool can have as few as three. In case you were wondering about a “stool pigeon,” it was originally a live bird attached by hunters to a stool, to attract other birds. In other words, it was a decoy, but in underworld lingo the term came to mean an informer.

But chairs can also be fun – as in the ever-popular party game of Musical Chairs – except that there’s nothing musical about the chairs at all.