Watching the English

by Kate Fox

typical English conversation may well start with a weather-speak greeting, progress to a bit more weather-speak ice-breaking, and then ‘default’ to weather-speak joking, moaning, intimacy-avoidance, stoicism, etc., at regular intervals. It is easy to see why many foreigners, and even many English commentators, have assumed that we must be obsessed with the subject. I am not claiming that we have no interest in the

fact, as the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss eventually explained, totems are symbols used to define social structures and relationships. The fact that one clan has as its totem the black cockatoo is not because of any deep significance attached to black cockatoos per se, but to define and delineate their relationship with another clan, whose totem is the white cockatoo. Now, the choice of cockatoos is not entirely random: totems tend to be local animals or plants with which the people are familiar, rather than abstract symbols. The selection of totems is thus not quite as arbitrary as, say, ‘You be the red team and we’ll be the blue team’: it is almost always the familiar natural world that is used symbolically to describe and demarcate the social world.

There is, however, one context in which English weather-speakers are not required to observe the agreement rule at all and that is the male-bonding argument, particularly the pub-argument.

This factor will come up again and again, and is explained in much more detail in Pub-talk (here), but for the moment, the critical point is that in English male-bonding arguments, particularly those conducted in the special environment of the pub, overt and constant disagreement – not just on the weather, but on everything else as well – is a means of expressing friendship and achieving intimacy.

The only conversational rule that can be applied with confidence to snow is a generic, and distinctively English, ‘moderation rule’: too much snow, like too much of anything, is to be deplored.

The English may, as Paxman says, have a ‘capacity for infinite surprise at the weather’, and he is also right in observing

that we like to be surprised by it. But we also expect to be surprised: we are accustomed to the variability of our weather, and we expect it to change quite frequently.

we get the same weather for more than a few days, we become uneasy: more than three days of rain, and we start worrying about floods; more than a day or two of snow, and disaster is declared,...

While we may spend much of our time moaning about our weather, foreigners are not allowed to criticise it.

Size, we sniffily point out, isn’t everything, and the English weather requires an appreciation of subtle changes and understated nuances, rather than a vulgar obsession with mere volume and magnitude.

The moderation rule reveals a dislike and disapproval of extremes,

The Shipping Forecast ritual illustrates a deep-seated need for a sense of safety, security and continuity

a reluctance to take things too seriously.

This is excruciatingly English: over-formality is embarrassing, but so is an inappropriate degree of informality (that problem with extremes again).

The ‘brash American’ approach: ‘Hi, I’m Bill, how are you?’, particularly if accompanied by an outstretched hand and beaming smile, makes the English wince and cringe. The American tourists and visitors I spoke to during my research had been both baffled and hurt by this reaction. ‘I just don’t get it,’ said one woman. ‘You say your name and they sort of wrinkle their noses, like you’ve told them something a bit too personal and embarrassing.’

this greeting is rarely delivered with ringing confidence: it is usually mumbled rather awkwardly, and as quickly as possible – ‘Plstmtye’ (or Nctmtye, Gdtmtye, etc.). This awkwardness may, perversely, occur precisely because people believe they are saying the ‘correct’ thing. Formality is embarrassing. But, then, informality is embarrassing. Everything is embarrassing.

more formal definition of gossip, the best I have come across is Noon & Delbridge (1993): ‘The process of informally communicating value-laden information about members of a social setting.’

Although it has been shown that criticism and negative evaluations account for only about five per cent of gossip time, gossip does generally involve the expression of opinions or feelings.

we rarely share details about ‘who is doing what with whom’ without providing some indication of our views on the matter.

is convinced that this is a universal human trait, and indeed maintains that language evolved to allow humans to gossip23. – as a substitute for the physical ‘social grooming’ of our primate ancestors, which became impractical among the much wider human social networks.

What I am suggesting is that gossip may be particularly important to the English, because of our obsession with privacy. When I conducted interviews and focus-group discussions on gossip with English people of different ages and social backgrounds, it became clear that their enjoyment of gossip had much to do with the element of ‘risk’ involved.

Although most of our gossip is fairly innocuous, it is still talk about people’s ‘private’ lives, and as such involves a sense of ...

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.

social setting’. The English may not gossip much

Unless you are the Queen, it is not considered entirely polite, for example, to ask someone directly, ‘What do you do?’,

But in addition to our privacy scruples, we English (especially the middle classes) seem to have a perverse need to make social life difficult for ourselves, so etiquette requires us to find a more roundabout, indirect way of discovering what people do for a living.

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.

‘Men just don’t do the he-said-she-said thing,’ one informant told me, ‘and it’s no good unless you actually know what people said.’

Another said: ‘Women tend to speculate more … They’ll talk about why someone did something, give a history to the situation.’ For women, this detailed speculation about possible motives and causes, requiring an exhaustive raking over ‘history’, is a crucial element of gossip, as is detailed speculation about possible outcomes. English males find all this detail boring, irrelevant and unmanly.

Nor am I saying that English conversation codes do not allow men to express emotion. 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.

When I asked English counter-complimenters why they could not just accept a compliment, they usually responded by reiterating their denial of the specific compliment in question, and often attempting to throw in a counter-compliment to me while they were at it. This was not helpful, except in confirming that the rule was deeply ingrained, so I tried to phrase the question in more general terms, talking about the patterns I had observed in their conversation, and asking how they would feel about someone who just accepted a compliment, without qualification, and didn’t offer one in return. The typical response was that this would be regarded as rather impolite and unfriendly, possibly even arrogant – one woman told me that it would be ‘almost as bad as boasting’, a slightly extreme view, but others felt that such a person would at least

One woman replied, and I swear this is true and was not prompted in any way, ‘Well, you’d know she wasn’t English!’

While English women are busy paying each other compliments, English men are usually putting each other down, in a competitive ritual that I call the Mine’s Better Than Yours game.

Earnestness is not allowed; zeal is unmanly; both are un-English and will invite ridicule.

The Mine’s Better Than Yours game is an exclusively male pastime. Accompanying females may occasionally spoil the fun by misunderstanding the rules and trying to inject an element of reason.

The only difference is that while introductions tend to be hurried – scrambled through in an effort to get the awkwardness over with as quickly as possible – partings, as if to compensate, are often tediously prolonged.

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.

In other cultures, there is ‘a time and a place’ for humour; it is a special, separate kind of talk. In English conversation, there is always an undercurrent of humour. We

Humour is our ‘default mode’, if you like: we do not have to switch it on deliberately, and we cannot switch it off.

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’.

Seriousness is acceptable; solemnity is prohibited. Sincerity is allowed; earnestness is strictly forbidden. Pomposity and self-importance are outlawed.

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.

We expect politicians to speak largely in platitudes, of course – ours are no different in this respect; it is the earnestness that makes us wince.

will rarely see English Oscar-winners indulging in these heart-on-sleeve displays – their speeches tend to be either short and dignified or self-deprecatingly humorous, and even so they nearly always manage to look uncomfortable and embarrassed.

While the majority of us (72 per cent) will say that expressing emotion is ‘healthy’, only a minority – less than 20 per cent – had actually expressed any emotion in the previous 24 hours, and 19 per cent could not even remember the last time they had expressed any emotion.

We English have become much better, in recent years, at talking about emotions – everyone has now mastered therapy-jargon, and can talk about ‘emotional intelligence’, the ‘inner child’ and the need to be ‘in touch’ with one’s feelings.

But most of us still don’t actually express these feelings very much.

‘Please stop this drivel. We don’t want it, it’s not needed and it really is an embarrassment to everyone’; ‘Calm down Americans … get a grip. London is over it – when’s the chippy open?’;

Again, though, I suspect that English self-mockery is rooted in a rather smug complacency, if not outright arrogance.