Ever since I came to UK (it’s been three years, oh boy), I’ve been wanting to dissect the peculiarisms of the British people with a surgical knife, and know more about their mannerisms. It started with the usual conversation starter, “you alright?”. Umm, yes, I’m alright, why do you ask? I wondered if this was to do with some sort of sickness that I portrayed outwardly, and at best, I dodged that question with the — “I’m fine, thank you”. But I now realise after living here for a while, that it’s not the most socially appropriate and acceptable answer.
Then you had the weather conversations. Which are not really about the weather, but it is actually a social ritual to help strangers get closer to each other. It’s the first and foremost, common enemy we moan about, and in this way, we become “friends” bonded by the grimmace towards this subject.
The other tipping point was this British Instagram account by name, William Hanson. Here’s the video which describes the process of eating rice: so you have to turn your fork upside down, and push the rice with a knife to the back of the fork and eat it. WTF?
I really wished there was a thorough anthropological study on the british specimen, which made me land here to this book titled, Watching the English, by Kate Fox. I wanted to learn the grammar of English behavior to better “educate” me..
Now, after reading the book, I realised a bit more nuances to the weather topic, and why it turns everyone into meterological analysts.
First of all, they serve as conversational fillers:
My research has convinced me that both Bryson and Paxman are missing the point, which is that our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all: 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’.
Second of all, it also helps gauge other people’s moods in the way they respond to the weather conversations before we start anything serious. If the weather is “wet and cold”, both sides of the conversation should universally be grumpy, and whine about it. The moaning rituals serve a prominent social purpose.
And that the right way to introduce yourselves in the british manner is actually no introduction at all. It’s almost as if you’re in the movies, you sit on the barstool waiting for your glass of beer in the pub, and a stranger sits next to you, and you casually slide into the conversation about the random topic that hits your mind. You don’t do it the american way by starting with “Hi, how are you? etc”. The census-form information is usually the hardest to obtain, and there is a lot of what-aboutery here. The same goes with “What do you do?”
Unless you are the Queen, it is not considered entirely polite, for example, to ask someone directly, ‘What do you do?’, although if you think about it, this is the most obvious question to put to a new acquaintance, and the easiest way to start a conversation. 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. It can be most amusing to listen to the tortured and devious lengths to which English people will go to ascertain a new acquaintance’s profession without actually asking the forbidden question. The guessing game, which is played at almost every middle-class social gathering where people are meeting each other for the first time, involves attempting to guess a person’s occupation from ‘clues’ in remarks made about other matters.
Even the goodbyes are fascinating. This is something I also relate with us Indians, we have different levels and stages of the goodbye. We say goodbye in plural, as we say goodbye once, and again at the doorstep, and again from the balcony window etc.. This also reminds me of the goodbye ritual which us, Malayalis are familiar with. We accompany our relatives even until the airport, and to bid goodbye before they enter the airport front entrance. In fact, this ritual is so prominent here in the south of India, that they have specific aircraft spotting lounges to finally bid goodbyes to your friends and family (atlast, you see the flight departing!)
Self deprecation is also in the blood. Kate Fox gives this example of how his husband who self-deprecates himself despite being a brain surgeon, notice the way he explains himself here:
To show how it works, however, I will take a relatively blatant example. My husband is a brain surgeon. When we first met, I asked what had led him to choose this profession. ‘Well, um,’ he replied, ‘I read PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford, but I found it all rather beyond me, so, er, I thought I’d better do something a bit less difficult.’ I laughed, but then, as he must have expected, protested that surely brain surgery could not really be described as an easy option. This gave him a further opportunity for self-deprecation. ‘Oh, no, it’s nowhere near as clever as it’s cracked up to be. To be honest, it’s actually a bit hit-or-miss.’
There is also no “time and place” for humour. Humour, mostly the self-deprecating kind, exists almost everywhere, diffusing into the ether. I had this strange feeling when I first joined Springer Nature, which had mostly a british crowd, and the most awkward embarassing jokes and memes were cracked even in public, official forums which are usually considered to be a bit more “serious”. This is one of those attributes I like about the British the most. Nothing is too serious.
While I would not claim that English comedy is superior to that of other nations, the fact that we have no concept of a separate ‘time and place’ for humour, that humour suffuses the English consciousness, does mean that English comic writers, artists and performers have to work quite hard to make us laugh. They have to produce something above and beyond the humour that permeates every aspect of our ordinary social interactions. Just because the English have ‘a good sense of humour’ does not mean that we are easily amused – quite the opposite: our keen, finely tuned sense of humour, and our irony-saturated culture probably make us harder to amuse than most other nations.
I also hate a couple of things they do. One is the short-form-ization of common words. “brekkie” for breakfast? “lester” for Leicester, “grenich” for Greenwich. They don’t seem to take the words quite literally. I realised from reading this book that there is also a class element attached to this short-form and long-formization:
Perhaps the most significant class indicator concerns which type of letter you favour in your pronunciation – or, rather, which type you fail to pronounce. Those at the top of the social scale like to think that their way of speaking is ‘correct’, as it is clear and intelligible and accurate, while lower-class speech is ‘incorrect’, a ‘lazy’ way of talking – unclear, often unintelligible, and just plain wrong. Exhibit A in this argument is the lower-class failure to pronounce consonants, in particular the glottal stop – the omission (swallowing, dropping) of t – and the dropping of h. But this is a case of the pot calling the kettle (or ke’le, if you prefer) black. The lower ranks may drop their consonants, but the upper class are often equally guilty of dropping their vowels. If you ask them the time, for example, the lower classes may tell you it is ‘’alf past ten’ (which may even come out sounding like ‘ah pass ten’), but the upper class will say ‘hpstn’. A handkerchief in working-class speech is ‘’ankercheef’, but in upper-class pronunciation becomes ‘hnkrchf’. Upper-class vowel-dropping may be frightfully smart, but it still sounds like a mobile-phone text message, and unless you are used to this clipped, abbreviated way of talking, it is no more intelligible than lower-class consonant-dropping. The only advantage of this SMS-speak is that it can be done without moving the mouth very much, allowing the speaker to maintain an aloof, deadpan expression and a stiff upper lip.
Only after reading this book did I realise that “toilet” was actually a severe crime. In their language, it was too lower-classy. I have now switches to “loo”
‘Toilet’ is another word that makes the higher classes flinch – or exchange knowing looks, if it is uttered by a would-be social-climber. The correct upper-middle/upper term is ‘loo’ or ‘lavatory’ (pronounced ‘lavuhtry’, with the accent on the first syllable).
Pub is an important “third place” for Britishers. Nearly three-quarters of the adult population visit pub regularly, atleast once a week. So if you want to know what the crowd in a particular region looks like (especially if you’re scouting for a new home to shift to), this looks like a good marker for what the crowd looks like.
It also provides the perfect ‘representative sample’ of the English population for any social scientist, as pubs are frequented by people of all ages, all social classes, all education-levels and every conceivable occupation. 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.
