Be careful about how personal you go

I took French throughout my schooling, and something I heard again and again over the years was not to ask a French person what their job is. In France and around Europe, it’s considered an overly personal question, and topics like politics are considered a more neutral — and intellectual — conversation space. This probably comes out of the fact that in Europe, where class has a longer and perhaps more complicated history, your profession has historically been deeply attached to your social status, and your social status has been trenchantly difficult to change. Asking a profession, then, amounts to asking, “what’s your social status?” In America, where we like to think of class as something changeable and thus less defining, and where work has less historically inscribed relationship to class, we don’t lend the question so much weight.