the NA hug: Erdedy's qualifying refusal
‘Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it’s a compound first name, hyphenated, “Roy-Tony” and then a last name, but well with respect to this hugging thing, Roy, it’s nothing personal, rest assured.’
Context
Erdedy's refusal is a perfect specimen of irony-as-armor rendered as syntax. Faced with a simple offered embrace, he retreats into hyper-qualified, distance-making, infinitely-hedging politeness — nested conditionals about how to address the man, "I wouldn't presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don't know you," the whole GoreTex-anorak apparatus of the account exec who manages human contact by pre-empting every possible reading of it. The qualifying is the point: every subordinate clause is a millimeter of protective distance inserted between himself and another body. It's the same faculty as Day's wit and Joelle's subjunctive — sincerity held off by superior articulation — here reduced to its comic essence, a man talking faster and faster to avoid being touched.