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as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.’
English weather-speak is a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our social inhibitions and actually talk to each other. Everyone knows, for example, that ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’, ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’, ‘Still raining, eh?’ and other variations on the theme are not requests for meteorological data: they are ritual greetings, conversation-starters or default ‘fillers’.
While we may spend much of our time moaning about our weather, foreigners are not allowed to criticise it. In this respect, we treat the English weather like a member of our family: one can complain about the behaviour of one’s own children or parents, but any hint of censure from an outsider is unacceptable, and very bad manners.
Our peculiar affection for our weather finds its most eloquent expression in our attitude towards a quintessentially English national institution: the Shipping Forecast.
The Shipping Forecast is an off-shore weather forecast, with additional information about wind-strength and visibility, for the fishing vessels, pleasure craft and cargo ships in the seas around the British Isles.
THE RULES OF INTRODUCTION Grooming-talk starts with greeting-talk. Weather-speak is needed in this context partly because greetings and introductions are such an awkward business for the English.
In fact, the only rule one can identify with any certainty in all this confusion over introductions and greetings is that, to be impeccably English, one must perform these rituals badly. One must appear self-conscious, ill-at-ease, stiff, awkward and, above all, embarrassed. Smoothness, glibness and confidence are inappropriate and un-English. Hesitation, dithering and ineptness are, surprising as it may seem, correct behaviour.
What about friendliness and pleasure in another's company? Beingglad to meet someone? No...I don't agree with this characterisation!!! In the 1950s perhaps...
But the most common form of grooming-talk among friends, in England as elsewhere, is gossip. The English are certainly a nation of gossips. Recent studies in this country have shown that about two-thirds of our conversation time is entirely devoted to social topics such as who is doing what with whom; who is ‘in’, who is ‘out’ and why; how to deal with difficult social situations; the behaviour and relationships of friends, family and celebrities; our own problems with family, friends, lovers, colleagues and neighbours; the minutiae of everyday social life – in a word: gossip.22.
Can't argue with this one, though!
The ‘invasion of privacy’ involved in gossip is particularly relevant for the rather inhibited English, for whom privacy is an especially serious matter. It is impossible to overstate the importance of privacy in English culture. Jeremy Paxman points out that ‘The importance of privacy informs the entire organisation of the country, from the assumptions on which laws are based, to the buildings in which the English live.’
disproportionate number of our most influential social rules and maxims are concerned with the maintenance of privacy: we are taught to mind our own business, not to pry, to keep ourselves to ourselves, not to make a scene or a fuss or draw attention to ourselves, and never to wash our dirty linen in public.
The English may not gossip much more than any other culture, but our privacy rules significantly enhance the value of gossip.
This is one of the reasons why foreigners often complain that the English are cold, reserved, unfriendly and standoffish. In most other cultures, revealing basic personal data – your name, what you do for a living, whether you are married or have children, where you live – is no big deal: in England, extracting such apparently trivial information from a new acquaintance can be like pulling teeth; every question makes us wince and recoil.
Don't agree with this either!
the English privacy rules ensure that any more interesting details about our lives and relationships are reserved for close friends and family. This is ‘privileged’ information, not to be bandied about indiscriminately. The English take a certain pride in this trait, and sneer at the stereotyped Americans who ‘tell you all about their divorce, their hysterectomy and their therapist within five minutes of meeting you’. This cliché, although not entirely without foundation, probably tells us more about the English and our privacy rules than it does about the Americans.
English males are allowed to express emotion. Well, they are allowed to express some emotions. Three, to be precise: surprise, providing it is conveyed by expletives; anger, generally communicated in the same manner; and elation/triumph, which again often involves shouting and swearing. It can thus sometimes be rather hard to tell exactly which of the three permitted emotions an Englishman is attempting to express.
Rubbish!!!
The counter-compliment ritual may be distinctively English, but it is also distinctively female.
The Mine’s Better Than Yours game is an exclusively male pastime.
Interesting but No! Not anything I:ve seen or done since junior school. It doesn'nt ring true at all now. Not at all!!
Much research in sociolinguistics has focused on this competitive/co-operative divide, and without subscribing to the more extreme of the ‘genderlect’ theories, it is clear that male bonding-talk often tends to be competitive, while female bonding-talk typically involves more ‘matching’ and co-operation.
these bonding-talk rituals also have certain important features in common, in their underlying rules and values, which may tell us a bit more about Englishness. Both, for example, involve proscription of boasting and prescription of humour. Both also require a degree of polite hypocrisy – or, at least, concealment of one’s real opinions or feelings (feigned admiration in the counter-compliment ritual, and fake light-heartedness in Mine’s Better Than Yours) – and in both cases, etiquette triumphs over truth and reason.
The rules of male and female bonding-talk reinforce the goose-and-gander point, but beneath striking (potentially dazzling) surface differences, they turn out to have critical features in common, including prohibition of boasting, prescription of humour and abhorrence of ‘earnestness’, polite hypocrisy and the triumph of etiquette over reason. Finally, the long-goodbye rule highlights (again) the importance of embarrassment and ineptitude in English social interactions – our apparently congenital inability to handle simple matters such as greeting and parting with any consistency or elegance –
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the most noticeable and important ‘rule’ about humour in English conversation is its dominance and pervasiveness. Humour rules. Humour governs. Humour is omnipresent and omnipotent.
My findings indicate that while there may indeed be something distinctive about English humour, the real ‘defining characteristic’ is the value we put on humour, the central importance of humour in English culture and social interactions.
For the English, the rules of humour are the cultural equivalent of natural laws – we obey them automatically, rather in the way that we obey the law of gravity.
At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of ‘earnestness’. Although we may not have a monopoly on humour, or even on irony, the English are probably more acutely sensitive than any other nation to the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘solemn’, between ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’.
This distinction is crucial to any kind of understanding of Englishness. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: if you are not able to grasp these subtle but vital differences, you will never understand the English – and even if you speak the language fluently, you will never feel or appear entirely at home in conversation with the English. Your English may be impeccable, but your behavioural ‘grammar’ will be full of glaring errors.
Seriousness is acceptable; solemnity is prohibited. Sincerity is allowed; earnestness is strictly forbidden.
Pomposity and self-importance are outlawed.
Serious matters can be spoken of seriously, but one must never take oneself too seriously. The ability to laugh at ourselves, although it may be rooted in a form of arrogance, or at least complacency, is one of the more endearing characteristics of the English. (At least, I hope I am right about this: if I have over...
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It is often said that the English suffer from a lack of patriotic feeling. And there is some evidence to support this claim: English people, on average, rate their degree of patriotism at just 5.8 out of 10, according to a European survey, far below the self-rated patriotism of the Scots, Welsh and Irish, and the lowest of all the European nations. Our ‘national day’, St George’s Day, is on 23 April, but surveys regularly show that at least two-thirds of us are completely unaware of this.
Three-quarters of us think that more should be done to celebrate our national day, and of these, 63 per cent would like us to ‘embrace’ St George’s Day as the Irish do St Patrick’s Day. Nearly half would like to see more people flying the English flag on St George’s Day. Only 11 per cent, however, would go so far as to fly the flag themselves, and 72 per cent said they would not be celebrating in any way or had no plans to celebrate, even though St George’s Day was on a Saturday that year.
First, there is a clue in the English quality of which we are most proud: our sense of humour. And a key element of this is the Importance of Not Being Earnest, the prohibition of excessive zeal. The boastful, sentimental, flag-waving patriotism of other nations is frowned upon and makes us cringe. We may feel proud to be English, but we are mostly too squeamish and too cynical – too conscious of the unwritten ban on earnestness – to make a big, gushy, patriotic fuss about it. Ironically, the English quality in which we take most pride, our sense of humour, prevents most of us from actually
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Second, you may well have noticed that the high percentage of English people who think that more should be done to celebrate St George’s Day (75 per cent) is almost exactly the same as the high percentage who have no intention of celebrating our national day themselves (72 per cent). This pattern also strikes me as typically English, and related to two possible ‘defining characteristics’ already encountered: moderation and Eeyorishness.
Many cannot even be bothered to vote in national elections, although the pollsters and pundits cannot seem to agree on whether our shamefully low turnout is due to cynicism or apathy – or, the most likely answer, a bit of both. Most of those who do vote do so in much the same highly sceptical spirit, choosing the ‘best of a bad lot’ or the ‘lesser of two evils’, rather than with any shining-eyed, fervent conviction that this or that political party is really going to make the world a better place. Such a suggestion would be greeted with the customary ‘Oh, come off it!’
The understatement is also difficult for foreigners to ‘get’ because it is, in effect, an in-joke about our own unwritten rules of humour. When we describe, say, a horrendous, traumatic and painful experience as ‘not very pleasant’, we are acknowledging the taboo on earnestness and the rules of irony, but at the same making fun of our ludicrously rigid obedience to these codes. We are exercising restraint, but in such an exaggerated manner that we are also (quietly) laughing at ourselves for doing so. We are parodying ourselves. Every understatement is a little private joke about Englishness.
There is also something quintessentially English about the nature of our response to earnestness. The ‘Oh, come off it!’ rule encapsulates a peculiarly English blend of armchair cynicism, ironic detachment, a squeamish distaste for sentimentality, a stubborn (empiricist?) refusal to be duped or taken in by fine rhetoric, and a mischievous delight in pin-pricking the balloons of pomposity and self-importance.
All English people, whether they admit it or not, are fitted with a sort of social Global Positioning Satellite computer that tells us a person’s position on the class map as soon as he or she begins to speak.
The importance of speech in this context may point to another English characteristic: our love of words. It has often been said that the English are very much a verbal rather than a visual culture, considerably more noted for our literature than for our art. We are also not particularly ‘tactile’ or physically expressive, not given to much touching or gesticulating. Words are our preferred medium, so it is perhaps significant that they should be our primary means of signalling and recognising social status.
then, surely all politeness is a form of hypocrisy: almost by definition, it involves pretence. The sociolinguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson argue that politeness ‘presupposes [the] potential for aggression as it seeks to disarm it, and makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties’. Also in the context of a discussion of aggression, Jeremy Paxman observes that our strict codes of manners and etiquette seem ‘to have been developed by the English to protect themselves from themselves’.
there does seem to be something distinctively English about the kind of whining involved in both weather-speak and racing-talk moaning rituals – a sort of grumpy and apathetic stoicism; complaining endlessly about unsatisfactory states of affairs, but in a resigned manner, without any real expectation that things could be improved, and certainly without any attempt to find means of improving them. I mentioned earlier that someone once said that the English have satire instead of revolutions (or something to that effect): we complain bitterly, and often wittily, but we do not actually do
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It would seem that we are not by nature reserved or unsociable, as some observers have suggested, but merely socially incompetent, self-conscious and easily embarrassed.
(I start at this point to wonder whether the English obsessions with ‘organised’ hobbies, clubs and sports – much remarked upon but never really explained by other commentators – might be in some way connected with our need for social facilitators of this kind.
The English are never so comfortably united and harmonious as when they are indulging in a collective grumble.
My hunch at the moment is that the English are not ‘reserved’ in the sense of unsociable. We may suffer from social dis-ease, but a truly unsociable, reclusive culture would not generate so many varied and ingenious antidotes to this dis-ease.
Hover above any English town for a few minutes, and you will see that the residential areas consist almost entirely of rows and rows of small boxes, each with its own tiny patch of green. In some parts of the country, the boxes will be a greyish colour, in others, a sort of reddish-brown. In more affluent areas, the boxes will be spaced further apart, and the patches of green attached to them will be larger. But the principle will be clear: the English all want to live in their own private little box with their own private little green bit.
Which brings me to the English mania for ‘home improvements’, or ‘DIY’. When Nikolaus Pevsner described ‘the proverbial Englishman’ as ‘busy in house and garden and garage with his own hands’, he hit the proverbial nail on the head. Never mind football, this is the real national obsession. We are a nation of nest-builders.
It is absolutely forbidden to ask directly what someone paid for their house
...but very easy to find out online these days with reasonable accuracy .
This perhaps gives us a clue as to why value can be discussed while price cannot: it seems that the current value of a house is regarded as a matter entirely outside our control, rather like the weather, while the price actually paid for a house is a clear indicator of a person’s financial status.
Whatever your class or financial status, and whatever the value of the house you are moving into, it is customary to disparage the taste of the previous occupant. If you do not have the time, skill or funds necessary to rip out all evidence of the former owner’s bad taste, you must, when showing friends around your new house, sigh deeply, roll your eyes or grimace and say, ‘Well, it’s not what we would have chosen, obviously, but we’ll just have to live with it for the moment,’ or, more succinctly, ‘We haven’t done this room yet.’ This will also save your guests from the dire embarrassment of
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Everything that estate agents do involves passing judgement not on some neutral piece of property but on us, on our lifestyle, our social position, our character, our private self. And sticking a price tag on it. No wonder we can’t stand them.
Even when there is plenty of room in a front garden for a garden seat of some sort, you will never see one.
DON'T Agree!!!
It is verging on blasphemous to say this, but I have to point out that the truly typical English back garden is actually a fairly dull rectangle of grass, with some sort of paved ‘patio’ at one end and a shed of no particular aesthetic or architectural merit at the other, a path down one side and perhaps a bed of rather unimaginatively arranged shrubs and flowers along the other side.
Gardeners Sworld swould not agree with this!! A whole industry of Garden Centres and plantsmen, nurseries and contractors ouldnt either!!!
