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’.
