Why, as one American visitor plaintively asked me, can’t the English just be ‘a bit more direct, you know, a bit more upfront?’ We would, as she pointed out, save ourselves and everybody else a great deal of trouble. The problem is, I think, that when we are ‘direct and upfront’, we tend to overdo it, becoming noisy, aggressive, rude and generally insufferable. Whenever I talk to English people about my research on Englishness, and mention that we tend to be inhibited and have lots of rules about politeness, they say, ‘But we’re not inhibited and polite – look at our football hooligans and
...more
