Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior

by Kate Fox

They will go to great lengths to avoid calling anyone or anything ‘working class’ – resorting to polite euphemisms such as ‘low-income groups’, ‘less privileged’, ‘ordinary people’, ‘less educated’, ‘the man in the street’, ‘tabloid readers’, ‘blue collar’, ‘state school’, ‘council estate’ and ‘popular’.

‘Working class’ has become a more pejorative term, associated with, ironically, people who do not work, so-called ‘benefit scroungers’, ‘chavs’, etc. There has always been a huge perceived gulf between the ‘respectable’,

Your accent and terminology reveal the class you were born into and raised in, not anything you have achieved through your own talents or efforts. And whatever you do accomplish, your position on the class scale will always be identifiable by your speech, unless you painstakingly train yourself to use the pronunciation and vocabulary of a different class.

It would be impossible even to attempt to understand Englishness without spending a lot of time in pubs, and it would almost be possible to achieve a good understanding of Englishness without ever leaving the pub.

My colleagues at SIRC and I have conducted quite extensive cross-cultural research on drinking-places43 (well, someone had to do it),

in which one finds a degree of ‘cultural remission’ – a structured, temporary relaxation or suspension of normal social controls (also known as ‘legitimised deviance’ or ‘time-out behaviour’).

the bar counter of the pub is one of the very few places in England where it is socially acceptable to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger.

start timing how long it would take tourists of different nationalities to realise that there was no waiter service. (For the record, the fastest time – two minutes, twenty-four seconds – was achieved by a sharp-eyed American couple; the slowest – forty-five minutes, thirteen seconds – was a group of young Italians although, to be fair, they were engrossed in an animated debate about football and did not appear much concerned about the apparent lack of service.

The field research for that book – a sort of nine-month nationwide pub-crawl

‘Cultural remission’ is not just a fancy academic way of saying ‘letting your hair down’. It does not mean abandoning all inhibitions and doing exactly as you please.

The bar counter is the only place in England in which anything is sold without the formation of a queue.

The truth of English etiquette is indeed stranger than even the strangest of fiction.)

not the kind of pantomime we see on stage at Christmas, but more like an Ingmar Bergman film in which the twitch of an eyebrow speaks volumes.

I have noticed that in the pub, names are used rather more often than is strictly necessary, as though to emphasise the familiarity and personal connections between members of this small ‘tribe’.

if you are English, you could easily spend a day among English workers and business people without noticing the omnipresent humour – in fact, you probably do this every day.

Now, when I witness some apparently bizarre or ludicrous English behaviour (as I write this, we are in the middle of the Christmas-party season) I can say to myself, for example, ‘Ah, yes: typical case of social dis-ease, medicated with alcohol and festive liminality, + humour + moderation’. (I don’t usually say it out loud, because people would think I was bonkers.)

the book has been a bit like one of those maths tests where you have to ‘show the workings-out’ rather than just putting down the final answer. This means that if you think I’ve got the final answer to the ‘What is Englishness?’ question wrong, at least you can see exactly where I made my mistakes. It also means that, at this point, you know at least as much as I do about the defining characteristics of Englishness we’ve been trying to identify. I don’t have anything up my sleeve to pull out for a grand finale. You could write this final chapter yourself if you felt like it.

I do realise that there’s a danger here of us ending up with enough home-made woolly jargon to knit ourselves a whole pointless new discipline (Englishness Studies or something equally inane), with its own impenetrable dialect.

Both our famous ‘English reserve’ and our infamous ‘English hooliganism’ are symptoms of this social dis-ease, as is our obsession with privacy.

When God (or Something) cursed us with the English Social Dis-ease, He/She/It softened the blow by also giving us the English Sense of Humour.

‘Not bad’ (meaning outstandingly brilliant); ‘A bit of a nuisance’ (meaning disastrous, traumatic, horrible); ‘Not very friendly’ (meaning abominably cruel);

Our ambivalence, apathy, woolliness, middlingness, fence-sitting and conservatism – and to some extent our tolerance, which tends to be at least partly a matter of benign indifference.

We do everything in moderation, except moderation, which we take to ludicrous extremes. Far from being wild and reckless, the English ‘youth of today’ are even more moderate, cautious and unadventurous than their parents’ generation.

‘What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!’ (OK, that last one is my own jokey invention, not an actual chant, but you get the point.)

‘Empiricism’ is shorthand for our down-to-earthness; our matter-of-factness; our pragmatism; our cynical, no-nonsense groundedness; our gritty realism; our distaste for artifice and pretension

we never complain to or confront the source of our discontent, but only whinge endlessly to each other, and proposing practical solutions is forbidden by the moaning rules.

What is distinctive about the English class system is (a) the fact that class is not judged at all on wealth, and very little on occupation, but purely on non-economic indicators such as speech, manner, taste and lifestyle choices; (b) the degree to which our class (and/or class-anxiety) determines our taste, behaviour and judgements; (c) the acute sensitivity of our on-board class-radar systems; and (d) our denial of all this and coy squeamishness about class: the hidden, indirect, unspoken, hypocritical/self-delusional nature of English class-consciousness (particularly among the middle classes)126. Our ‘polite egalitarianism’. The vestigial prejudice against ‘trade’. The minutiae and sheer mind-boggling silliness of our class indicators and class anxieties. Our sense of humour about all this.

we accept that there will be winners and losers, but feel that everyone should be given a fair chance, providing they observe the rules (the unwritten social rules, I mean, not necessarily the official/legal ones, which may often be dismissed as ‘unfair’)