small talk

The act of supplying a person with irrelevant information about oneself in an attempt to appear friendly and normal to a person one is meeting for the first time. This practice I'd particularly important to extroverts (people who take pleasure in spewing random bits of their life stories at anybody who will listen,) who use it to try to judge and impress others with the ability to observe the weather and remember how many siblings they have. Unfortunately, these skills are widely regarded by introverts as both unimpressive and anyway pointless due to the fact that introverts and extroverts alike do not usually give a damn about how long their neighbors have been married and are not likely to remember unless their neighbors are close friends, in which case small talk usually isn't used anyway. Note: all people resort to small talk in uncomfortable situations.