Leaving Sheffield

When I got to Quito, Ecuador in 1996, I hated it.  HATED it.  It was my first experience in a 3rd world city, and it was busy, maddening, crowded, unkempt, and dirty.  Thick pollution everywhere.  It had no mass transit system beyond buses that still used leaded gasoline.  So the busy streets would be filled with heavy black exhaust smoke that turned your collar, canvas bag, and mucus a dark grey.  God knows what it was doing to your lungs.

And then when I was leaving 10 months later, I remember walking the streets of the beautiful, appealing, lively Quito I had come to know at love.  The steep, hilly streets had charm, the neighborhoods had a raw aliveness that I had never known in the states.  I don't know when it happened, but the city turned itself inside out until it was one of my favorite places that I didn't want to leave.

This happens to me all the time.  I hated college for my first year and a half, and when I graduated I loved it so much I wouldn't have traded it for any school in the world.  When I first got to Tanzania I realized that there’s a third world in the third world, and I was in a place far poorer than Ecuador.  I was out of place, overwhelmed, overheated, and resisting everything.  And when I left ten months later I cried as if I was leaving a family member.

And now I'm leaving Sheffield.  When I first got here it was a grey, dull, failed industrial town with no charm.  It was overcast all the time, it had none of the beautiful architecture of Bath, it had none of the culture of London, and it claimed Def Leppard as one of its sons.  But now, 15 weeks later, I’m leaving a city I love.  The streets are home, the industrial sectors have their own gritty style, and the whole town exudes the pride of a post-industrial survivor.  I spent 4 hours today in my U.K. hometown trying to find a t-shirt that said Sheffield on it.  (They don't exist.  I had to settle for a mug.)  Sheffield, now, to me, is beautiful.

So is Sheffield objectively beautiful or not?  For me it wasn't and then it was, even though none of the concrete details changed.  Is beauty only a subjective thing?  Does such subjectivity mean it can subjectively change within an individual mind?  If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then how do you explain the "beholder" finding something ugly and then beautiful?  Do we have any control over this?  Could I have worked hard to see the beauty in Sheffield when I first arrived?  Or do I have no agency over these perceptions of beauty?  If beauty is up for grabs in my capricious mind and a city can transmute from ugly to beautiful (and maybe back again), then is anything actually beautiful "out there" outside of our own heads?

Sigh.  Questions for another day I suppose.  Back to leaving Sheffield.

When I first heard I was placed in Sheffield, I felt the acute loss of London, where I originally thought I would be.  And London is great--undoubtedly one of the premier cities in the world.  There's ALWAYS something happening that you're dying to see.  I'm here in the U.K. to study a very narrow field of academia and education (teaching ethics to high school students), and even within such narrowness London had something related happening all the time:  a conference one day, a lecture the next, a class the following day, etc.  I once planned to be there for just a couple of days, but then kept adding days because I there as always something else to see.  You never leave London because you're done with it:  you have to just abandon it and miss the rest of the goings on.

And yet, and yet.  London is a tourist’s paradise.  I would conjecture that Big Ben is the most photographed thing in the world on any given day—the city is awash in foreigners, and many of them are in front of Big Ben clicking away.  The Tate Modern, The Eye, the National Theatre, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, the Globe Theater--you could spend a month there on these tourist traps alone.  As great as these places might be, isn't there's always something a little flat, a little dead, a little over about these places?  As always, David Foster Wallace said it better than any other human possibly could.  After attending the Maine Lobster Festival, he muses:

“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

So no, I didn't live in London.  I never went in The Eye, never went to St. Paul's Cathedral.  Never saw a Premier League game, never took a boat down the Thames.  I wasn't opposed to doing any of those things, I was just in Sheffield at the time.  And when I find myself regretting that I missed those classic London experiences, I'm consoled by the fact that I was in Sheffield, a very real place that was just going about its business, and I happened to be there.  I hardly heard another American accent the whole time I was here.  The British Rough Guide is 1,000 pages long, and it devotes exactly two pages to Sheffield, even though it's the 5th biggest city in England.  Sheffield was a better, realer place than London would have been.

And I can't tell if this is selfish or affectionate, but in an important way Sheffield is mine.  The Globe Theater is everyone's, but Carl at The Last Chapter bookstore on Rustling's road is mine, and I got to talk to him most every day.  The grey skies, the abandoned foundries, the losing records of the soccer teams, all mine.

Why do we love the scarred and the skewed so much?  Why is the bastard child on Game of Thrones our favorite son?  Why will I leave with more pride about being a temporary Sheffieldian than if I had been a temporary Londoner?  Who knows.  But when something is yours and you commit to it, it becomes inevitable and inextricable.  It’s the way of a parent’s particular love for their children, as described by Andrew Solomon:

"But why does any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined?  If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children--brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished--I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter."

USA 1, England 1

Here's the very best part of being American:

We still have wild landscapes to visit.

Not that many wild landscapes, but at least we've got some.  Sure there's less than .01% of the original prairie left in Illinois, and Bill Cody killed over 20,000 buffalo all by himself, and we've cut down over three quarters of the original forests.  But in England it's far worse.  As an Englishman would say, you can't go anywhere without seeing the hand of man.  Every last bit of land has been stitched up, turned over, cut down, groomed,  replanted, shorn, paved over, built upon, remade, retooled, and redone.  That's what happens when western civilization settles in for centuries.  Think about it:  where has civilization been the longest?  Iraq.  What did Iraq used to be?  A forest, the land of milk and honey.  What is it now?  A desert.  That's where we're all heading, given enough time.

But for now, the young 200-year-old U.S.A. still has places like the Wind River Valley in Wyoming, where people leave footprints and take pictures and nothing else.  It's a place where the rocks, mountains, trees, and animals are still intact, for miles and miles.  The national park I know best in England is the Peak District--and I use the term "park" lightly.  What does this national park have in it?  Paved roads, houses, pubs, walls, farms, a North Face, a swimming pool, a grocery store, coffee shops, parked cars, and a train station.  That's as rustic as it gets.  In the U.S. we've still got some untouched places, and we've also got variety:  deserts, snow, sun, scrub brush, plains, forests, big mountains, medium mountains, small mountains.  In England they like to tell you about how different the landscape is from north to south, but it's about as different as northern and southern Wisconsin.  

And the countrysides have got to be a part of a nation's mindset.  In America we've always had a place to escape to--we kept heading west, and when that was settled (stolen) we decided to just move from city to city when we wanted.  And at the very least, we can always head out to some kind of wilderness if we want.  In England?  No way.  Your mind doesn't roam across possible landscapes--you're always "cabined, cribbed, confined" as Shakespeare wrote.  The whole country has been locked in like this for centuries, and the idea of escape isn't passed on because the elders and the elders' elders have been swaddled in this island papoose for a long time.

But maybe the eternal frontier isn't always a good thing.  Outer space is the only frontier where the U.S. hasn't stolen something from somebody (so far).  But across the American west?  We stole, murdered, killed, genocided, infected blankets, the whole sordid story.  We started living in someone else's house without asking.  It's rather rude.

And there's another reason the eternal frontier might not be a good thing, but we have to backtrack for a moment.  As I've said before, I'm regularly amazed by the intelligence of the average Englishman.  I play back my interviews and marvel at the articulacy, the vocabulary, the depth of the ideas, the deep critiquing--all amidst my own halting, lumbering questions in a thick American accent.  (Oh who can invent a device to erase the questioner's voice from an interview!!)  And this intellectual streak in the English exposes the anti-intellectual streak in America.  How else do you explain our Republican Party?  The Tea Party?  The U.S. is a country where more people believe in angels than they do evolution.  In England they put Darwin on their money.  Only 40% of Americans see global warming as a serious threat.  To be as unenlightened as America is takes effort, a kind of commitment ignorance, a strange pleasure in knowing nothing.  

Which leads us to the question:  does American anti-intellectualism have anything to do with our eternal frontier?  If escape is an essential part of our psychology, does it contribute to our aggressive ignorance?  When we were settling the west did we forget to read books?  Did we have to shut down our ability to think and reason because if we didn't, we couldn't for a second justify what we were doing to the Native Americans?

One of the greatest American comedians of all time was Bill Hicks.  Most every comedian I like today is derivative of him in some way, and a couple comics still outright steal his stuff.  He was virtually unknown in America--he was too smart, too sharp, too penetrating in his dissection of foreign policy, too biting in his critique of the consumerist machine.  Where did he achieve his fame and play to sold out theaters?  England.  That's another problem with anti-intellectualism America:  you miss the very people that could have saved you.  They were right in your midst.

It's Overcast Today Part 2

O.K., so I've taken my shot at the overcast weather. Hope it didn't sound suicidal or anything. But I can pull us back from the brink. Humans can get used to pretty much anything, and yes, I've gotten used to endless overcast days. Came to accept it.

Even came to crave it.   Here's why: When it's overcast, you get a lot done.

We've all felt this way. Think back to when you were a kid and it was a rainy day, and you weren't at school or anything, so you had the whole day to play. Didn't you get that really ambitious, creative, constructive feeling? The one where you suddenly wanted to take on a big project: build a Lego town, design your own board game, write a story, create an elaborate scenario with your dolls and action figures. And you’re kind of glad it's raining because you're supposed to be inside doing this.  If it was sunny you would feel obligated to enjoy the sunshine and summer or something.

On most days here in Sheffield I have a whole lot to do, stuff that I look forward to: a full platter of reading, writing, interviewing, and thinking. I'm eager to leave my flat, get to the university library, and hunker down to work. But if I step outside to the rare day of blues skies and sunshine, I'm now actually disappointed, thinking "damn, now I have to stay outside today and walk everywhere and go to the botanical garden because it's so beautiful out, and I won't get anything done."

And maybe that's why England and Ireland have such great literature. For me, this is will always be the very best feature of the U.K.: their love for words and wit and poetry and prose and beauty and expression, all of which turns into some damn fine works. And is it any surprise? They were stuck inside on rainy days with nothing but pen and paper and their own creativity. Mary Shelley is a perfect example. As the story goes, at age 19 she was vacationing with a bunch of writers, and one day it started to rain so they were all stuck inside with nothing to do. So Lord Byron (the famous poet) said they each should think up a story. Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein, which later became her most famous book. She thought the story because it was raining. It's not a stretch to say if there was no rain that day, we'd have no Frankenstein. She explained, "I busied myself to think of a story, - a story to rival those which had excited us to this task." That's what you do when it rains, you busy yourself to think of the best things your brain can muster.

To further prove this weather theory of culture, let's turn to Russia. Russia is not only overcast, it's freezing cold, so they're shut inside for even longer than the English. Thus it's no surprise that they have such a great tradition of literature--of long, complex, rich, intense, intelligent novels. And then they take a break to play a long, complex, intense, intelligent game of chess.

When I was talking all this over with a Fulbright colleague, he agreed. He said people in these bad-weather countries are always indoors, where they sit down and say "let's think this through." And what's the "this"?  Only our most essential and most desperate questions. Then they write it all down, and are kind enough to share it with everyone else, most of whom are far away and outside, enjoy their own country’s beautiful weather.

It's Overcast Today Part 1

It’s overcast today in Sheffield.  It’s overcast most days.  I think that's why England colonized so many places--they wanted territory with some sun.  And the grayness is boring:  it's not a black swirl of clouds rushing in for a storm, it's not puffy clouds with beams of sunlight shining through.  It's just a big, heavy slate of gray pushing down on everything.  Sometimes it will finally rain, but it’s always a gentle rain that doesn’t even require an umbrella--it’s like water decided to hang out in the air for a while.  You don’t even get the eventfulness of a downpour, you just get some wetness to make it even more of a bummer.  I think that's why London is such an incredible city.  It's like they decided to make it so big and varied and impressive and busy and culturally rich that the weather is irrelevant.  You don't care if it's dreary, because you're heading somewhere indoors to enjoy some of the world’s finest intellectual and artistic achievements.  But in the rest of the country, it's just dreary. 

When I read Keats' anthropomorphization of the English sun,

            “So dear a picture of his sovereign power,

            And I could witness his most kingly hour,

            When he doth lighten up the golden reins,

            And paces leisurely down amber plains.”

I couldn’t help thinking “what sun are you talking about?”

I guess some people like the gray weather. But I don’t. I’ll self-diagnose and say I have seasonal affective disorder, so I take it harder than most.

And an overcast sky affects everything.  It’s not just that there’s a gray sky up there; when it’s overcast everything down here is gloomy and washed out too. Sidewalks, storefronts, trees, cars, jeans, mailboxes, dog collars, shoelaces are all transformed for the worse.  It’s most accurate to say I’ve lived in two Sheffields: one when it’s overcast, and one when it’s (occasionally) sunny.

That must be why English authors wax so poetic when the sun finally does come out. They usually feel compelled to put pen to paper when the spring sun emerges after a bleak winter.  Here’s Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights:

“In winter, nothing more dreary, in summer, nothing more divine than those glens shut in by hills, and those bluff, bold swells of heath.”

Notice how she doesn’t have the spirit to list any images when she mentions the winter--she’s been so sapped by the lack of sun that he can only muster up the adjective “dreary.” But once she writes the word “summer,” the sentence takes off with superlatives and rhythm and musicality and particularity.

Or Orwell:

“Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last September.”

See, when the sun comes out everything is transfigured, down to the policeman’s tunic. Two tunics: one when the sun is out, one when it’s overcast.

My friend Jeanne came and visited me for a weekend in Sheffield.  To my surprise it was sunny and warm the entire time. She left saying Sheffield was a “magical” city. Magical?  The city described  as a “blah town,” a “collapsed industrial community,” and “the Pittsburgh and Detroit of England”?  The city of "fumes and furnace-glares" as poet Philip Larkin wrote?  But that’s what the sun can do for you.

I always wondered about this when my students go on college visits.  What if they visit a school and it’s raining that day? Wouldn’t that color your whole impression of the place?  What if they only visit two schools and it was raining for one visit but sunny for the other?  Wouldn’t the sunny one have an incredible advantage?

(Also, when you visit a school, you get one guide that day.  I’ve always wondered, what if you get a great, friendly, funny, good-looking guide?  Wouldn’t that color your whole perception of the school?  Or what if you get curt and unpleasant one?  How can you even know how you feel about a school with all the randomness that comes in a one-day visit?  You can't. All of life is probably just guesswork anyway.)

But the worst part of an overcast day isn’t that it washes out the world where you move and exist. It soon turns into a slow obliteration.  A bitterly cold day in Chicago has a narrative, has drama, has some aggression on which you can build your own flinty toughness.  But a gray day in Sheffield is a leaking away into flatness, into absence. You’d give anything to be in some sort of acute pain or specific trauma, because that at least has some poetry in it. Instead your brain just fogs up and you lose your claim on the afternoon.  You're a half self that can only half see, half think, half breathe, half plan, half live.

And then when the sun finally does come out, you get panicked.  The sun is out!  What should I do?  I have to get out of the house right now!!  I have to let it beam on my face with no sunglasses and I'll let it burn out my retinas if I need to!!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  I just started a load of laundry.  Stay there sun, stay there, I'm coming out in a second!  I need to let you soak into my exposed skin and bank it for the next 3 weeks!

In the past I've wondered how England and Spain, two countries not all that far apart, can be so different.  In Spain they party all night.  In England, most shops close by 6.  In Spain you meet to go out at 11:30 pm.  In England, you've completed your R.E.M. stage by 11:30. In Spain they're and loud and playful and dance in loose clothing.  In England they're enclosed and quiet and inhibited and thoughtful.  But these countries are only about 700 miles apart--as far apart as Chicago and New York. So what gives?  Obvious: the weather. Spain is warm and sunny and a Mediterranean climate.  England lives under a dome of drizzle.  If I had to pick only one thing that creates any country's cultural character, I'd probably go with the weather.  Finnish people are quiet and in their snow covered houses. Brazilians are gyrating their tan bodies in the street.

The sun is so damn important. In a long and wonderful routine about how New York is better than California, George Carlin then confesses that he actually lives in Los Angeles. “So why do I live here?” he asks.  “Because the sun goes down a block from my house.” Later he explains why he chooses to worship the sun instead of God:

"Overnight I became a sun-worshipper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I'm big on that. If I can see something, I don't know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know? So every day I can see the sun, as it gives me everything I need; heat, light, food, flowers in the park, reflections on the lake, an occasional skin cancer, but hey. At least there are no crucifixions, and we're not setting people on fire simply because they don't agree with us. Sun worship is fairly simple. There's no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don't have a special building where we all gather once a week to compare clothing. And the best thing about the sun, it never tells me I'm unworthy. Doesn't tell me I'm a bad person who needs to be saved. Hasn't said an unkind word. Treats me fine. So, I worship the sun. But, I don't pray to the sun. Know why? I wouldn't presume on our friendship. It's not polite."

Keep Calm And Pull Up The Drawbridge

I haven't seen one person lose it since I've been in England.  And by "lose it" I mean what we all see from time to time in the U.S.: someone in a checkout line yells at the cashier, two drivers jaw through open windows at a stoplight, a parent screams at her child on the subway, someone angrily asks to see the restaurant's manager, a friend shouts at their insurance company over the phone.  About 75% of everyone in the DMV is in some state of losing it.

Nothing like that ever happens here. Politeness reigns. If you bump into someone and it's clearly your fault, they'll say "I'm sorry." You know how in most places if you get on the bus and you don't quite know the procedure--do I give the driver the money, do I put it in this machine, do use this pass that might have only half the fare, etc.--you can feel driver barely contain his grousing, and anyone behind you will start their eye rolling or bellyaching or outright complaining. Not here. You can get on a bus, ask the driver 10 questions about where you're trying to go, count out your change like a foreigner, and the driver will pleasantly say thank you, and all the while the ten people behind waited patiently without a bit of resentment. I've seen 20 high school kids get off a public bus and, unprompted, every single one said thank you to the driver.  In other countries there's always some kind of menace just around the corner: some guy will want to beat you up at the bar for no reason, a traffic cop will get outraged you're not turning fast enough, someone will bowl you over to get on the crowded train. I remember flying into Boston a few months ago, getting on the Red Line, and looking at a guy for one second too long.  He screamed  "What the fuck you looking at!?"   That's the welcoming committee in Boston.

Never, ever any such thing in England. Go anywhere, ask a question of anyone, and you'll find nothing but cordiality. It's quite a relief.

Though there's a flipside to this politeness. The English may always treat you with geniality, but they'll never invite you anywhere. And this is the most striking difference between the U.K. and my years in Ecuador and Tanzania. In those 3rd world countries, by the time you catch a bus from the airport to your hotel, you'll have five or six invitations to someone's house. In Tanzania you call complete strangers your brother, sister, mother, father, son, or daughter upon first meeting. The whole country is your family when you land. In England?  Not so. I talked to a Polish woman who moved to Sheffield two years ago, and she said she barely has one English friend. Anthropologist Kate Fox says it's typical for the English to hustle home, "pull up the drawbridge," and stay inside.  Neighbors barely know each other.  Your high school mates are your small circle of friends into adulthood.  Fox makes a distinction between negative politeness and positive politeness:  positive politeness is when you go out of your way and take action to help someone. But with negative politeness, "negative" isn't pejorative--it just means you're polite by not intruding upon anyone, by respecting their space and their privacy. It's the politeness of leaving someone alone. 

Moderation in the U.K.

Let’s do some thought experiments.  Imagine that tomorrow in America fireworks were made legal in every state, and you could by them at the 7/11, CVS, or your local grocery store.  How would we react?  I think we’d go fireworks crazy, and by the end of the day we’d have a lot of limbless and eyeless people staggering around.

Or imagine that gambling was legal everywhere in the U.S., and you could find an off-track-betting site in every strip mall and on every main street.  What would happen?  My guess is there'd be a bunch of fathers who would have to tell their kids they had to go to the community college instead.

What if, again in the U.S., we dropped the drinking age down to 18, and universities their own pub in the student union.  Students could even drink between classes if they wanted.  How would that go?  Safe to say we’d have fewer people studying for those midterms.

But here in the U.K., I could do the following in a five minute walk down one street in Sheffield:  buy some fireworks at a grocery story, stroll down a block or two and put a bet on the Bears-Packers game at an OTB, and then get a pint at the pub housed at the local university's student union.

And none of this is a problem.

Even though gambling is legal everywhere in England, there’s no Las Vegas seediness built up around it.  No one is throwing away their savings.

I’ve walked into the university pub at 10 am in the morning where students have pints in hand, but they're talking calmly, shooting pool, and maintaining complete control.

And I’ve never even seen someone buy fireworks at the grocery story.

This is because defining characteristics of English culture are moderation, restraint, and reasonableness. 

Until they go to the soccer game.

The Full English/Irish Breakfast

It's hard to know exactly how England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales feel about each other.  If you mention Wales to the English, they'll say "ba-a-a-a-a"--meaning Wales is rural and backwards and full of sheep.  If you ask the Irish about the English, they'll say England is like an older brother who annoys you, but they're still your brother.  I'm not sure anyone has an opinion about Northern Ireland, but Game of Thrones is being filmed there, so that's something.
 

But England and Ireland are embroiled in a war over breakfast.  When I'm home in Evanston, IL, one of my favorite things to do is call up my friend Erin to go have dinner at the Celtic Knot.  I always order a full Irish breakfast: two eggs, baked beans, bacon (ham to an American), pork sausages, mushrooms, and black and white pudding.  In case you don't know, black pudding is a sausage made of congealed, dried pig's blood and filler.  White pudding is a sausage made of oatmeal and the hard white fat found in the kidney and loins of the pig.  Yum!!   

England also has the full English breakfast, which is the same thing but without the black and white pudding. Because they're more sophisticated.

So who started it first?  Who copied the other and then just added or subtracted the black and white pudding?  They both claim it as their own, which reminds me of the numerous indigenous tribes in Tanzania that each believe all the cows in the world belong to them as a gift from God.

Once I asked and Englishman what was the difference between the English and the Irish breakfast.  He said, "they're drunk when they eat it in the morning."

An annoying older brother.

The English of the English: Part 3

A Part For A Whole

English English also has a tendency to use an example or part of something to stand for its whole.  For example, the word “pudding” to an American is just one type of dessert.  But in England, “pudding” means dessert itself.  Or to sit down for “tea” (at night) means to eat dinner, even though tea is just a small part of it. 

I can only think of one American parallel.  When I was growing up we called our gym shoes “tennis shoes” or “tennies.”  They were not just for tennis—in fact we hardly ever played tennis.  They were just our gym shoes.

Which makes me wonder, why the privileging?  Why was tennis the sport that would stand for all the rest?  Or pudding the dessert that would mean all sweet things?

Though I can’t argue with the choice of pudding.  It’s a premiere dessert.  You heard me, cake.

The Oft Used

Brilliant.  Maybe the most popular adjective here—so popular I’ve heard it shortened to “brill”.  It doesn’t really mean smart, it just means “good” or “great” or “that works” or “sure” or “yes”.  When I texted a phone number to my roommate, he texted me back “Brilliant Steve, cheers!”  For just a moment, I felt really smart for typing in numbers on a keypad.

Proper.  This is one of my favorites.  It’s a superlative modifier, basically equivalent to saying “great” or “awesome” or “the best.”  A “proper pub” is a pub that does everything right, a “proper soccer player” has no weakness in his game, a “proper movie” gets four out of four stars.  To Americans the word “proper” is pretty underwhelming—it mostly sounds like you’re just fulfilling minimal requirements.  If we say someone cooks “properly” or plays guitar “properly”, we’re hardly raving about their skills.  But the English love understatement, so it fits to make “proper” your superlative. 

And it works well if you think about it.  To me it means something is fulfilling its promise, finally reaching the potential that was already there.  It’s the Aristotelian telos, the working out of its true nature, its original purpose.  For example, I would say Public Enemy is a “proper” rap band. So you first think about rap music:  since the invention of the genre, it has always had a certain potential, and at some point someone would realize all of its promise, achieve all that it set out to do, transcend all other participants.  Which is what Public Enemy did.  They finally did rap “properly”, and are therefore a “proper” rap band.  The Rolling Stones in the early seventies were a proper rock band.  Louis C.K. is a proper comedian.  David Foster Wallace is a proper writer.  Malcolm X was a proper activist.  Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are proper senators.  “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop is a proper villanelle.  Osprey makes proper backpacks.

Making Fun Of Someone

This falls into the Eskimos-have-50-words-for-snow category, which suggests that what’s important or ubiquitous in a culture will have multiple terms.

In English culture, ironic humor is ever-present.  Much of it can subtle, wry, and given away by something like an eyebrow lift.  But oh my goodness it’s there—even when they’re being sincere, it still seems like a droll humor undergirds it all.

But then they’ll break free (often at a pub) and tease each other to great effect and great enjoyment.  So they’d need a bunch of ways to say “make fun of”:

To take a piss

To take the piss out of

To have a go at

To wind up

To slag off

What That I Refuse To Say

Cheers.  Because I’m clearly an American when I speak, and I’d feel like a fraud saying the most obvious of British words.

Zed and haytch.  That’s how they say the letter “z” and “h”.  Just sounds silly.

Toilet.  That is the polite way to refer to the bathroom.  They never say “restroom” and they understand “bathroom.”  They do say “lavatory” and “loo”.  But they mostly say “toilet”.  If you’re at a nice dinner in a nice home with some nice people eating on nice plates with nice silverware, and then you have to relieve yourself, you say “can you point me to the toilet?”  The toilet.  You reference the thing that catches your urine and feces.  You call up that image.  I’ve asked British friends over and over again if they’re sure it’s O.K. to say it, and they insist it’s as polite as it gets.  But I still can’t do it.

And if you’re in the U.K. long enough, you’ll eventually hear someone say “wait a second, I have to go wash my hands in the toilet.”

The Most Common Greeting

A lot of Americans have trouble with this.  Instead of saying “hello,” “what’s up,” “can I help you,” or “how are you doing,” the English say “are you alright there?”

It’s weird.  We (Americans) only say “are you alright there?” after something bad has happened.  Your friend trips on the sidewalk, your coworker looks wan with the flu, your teammate gets hit by a pitch, so you come up to them and say “are you alright?”  Which is to say “I noticed something bad just happened to you, and I want to make sure you are O.K. in light of this misfortune.”

When an American walks into a restaurant they’re primed to hear the hostess say “can I help you” or “how are you folks doing tonight” or “would you like to be seated?”; but in England she’ll say “are you alright there?”

You’re tempted to say “yes, I’m alright here in this spot, as I would be in many other spots, as I would be sitting at one of the tables in your fine establishment, which is why I came in here.”  But they’re not asking if you’re alright, they’re just saying “hello” or “can I help you.”

But let’s think for a moment.  If language is culture and culture is language, what’s going on here?  In the book Watching the English by anthropologist Kate Fox, she talks about a gritty stoicism found in English culture.  The English can be pretty tough, weathering wars and monarchies and bad weather, inventing tough games like rugby and soccer, standing for hours through a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theater.  They’ll just gut it out if they need to.  And a certain pessimism is at work too—they expect the worst, talk about the worst, and then when the worst does happen they have misanthropic pleasure in being right, and then they get to tough something out once again.

So for me, “are you alright there?” is an English person saying “Look, I know you’re probably in some sort of pain or something isn’t going well since our lives are a hard slog at best or hellish at worst.  So I’ll start with the bleak assumption that something is wrong, and I’ll ask if you’re alright amidst our grim, Sisyphean, daily existences.”

The English of the English: Part 2

Let’s sift through some English English usage and the American equivalents.  In categories!

 

What Americans Already Know Before They Go To England

cheers = thanks

dodgy = questionable or scary

holiday = vacation

fancy = like

chips = fries

flat = apartment

mate = friend

biscuit = cookie

lift = elevator

 

What You Can Figure Out The First Time You Hear It

ring = call (as in “ring me up later tonight”)

telly = television

give it a think = think it over (I kinda like this one)

torch = flashlight (makes the flashlight much more dramatic)

tutor = professor

fresher = freshman

revising = studying

read = studied (as in “I read economics in college”)

daft = crazy

tick = check (a verb, to tick a box on a form)

posh = wealthy, upper class

induction = orientation

top up = top off (as in “can I top up your coffee?”)

interval = intermission

let = rent (verb)

potato jacket = potato skin

note = bill

Notes and bills refer to paper money.  I was actually scolded by a cashier when I said “bill”, to which I should have replied:  “Honey, I’m American.  Which of our countries has more money circulating the world right now?  Why don’t you let me call the shots.”

Weird And Wild Ones You Can’t Help But Like

choc a bloc = crowded, loaded, full

gobsmacked = surprised

Gobsmacked literally it means “spit hit my face,” which is usually a rather surprising thing, so it makes sense.

Ones I’d Never Heard Before

good nick = good shape

knackered = tired, exhausted

go for a slash = urinate

swotted = crammed (for an exam)

naff = kitsch, camp, naïve bad taste

Two Funny Ones Because They’re Inadvertently Sexual

cock up = screw up (fill in your own joke)

rubber = eraser

And yes, an American colleague has heard a British teacher say to her students “please take out your rubbers” and “we’ve got rubbers in the back if you need them.”  To which no British teenager laughed at all (though my colleague did).

The English of the English: Part 1

One of the reasons I came to the U.K. is because they speak my first language.  Sort of.

My year in Ecuador and my year in Tanzania had two gigantic hurdles:  Spanish and Swahili.  Maneuvering in those new languages took up maybe 50% of my energy, and it was by far the core struggle of those times abroad.  So when I was applying for the Fulbright, I decided to do something radical:  go to a country that was the first world and spoke my language.  Cut out that major obstacle and see where I end up.

And in the U.K. that’s mostly true, because American English is mostly the same as English English.  But not entirely.  It’s different enough trip you up, and often leads to awkward conversations with the already awkward English people.  G. B. Shaw was right: “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”

First, there’s the accent.  Apparently they’ve got different regional accents, but I can’t hear them.  It might be because I’m TERRIBLE with accents.  Here are the four things I’m the worst at in the world:  billiards, basketball, drawing, and doing accents.  My friends tell me my father has a German/Serbian accent, but I’ve never heard it.  I’ve tried to imitate the British accent, but it just ends up sounding like a stew of Scottish, Irish, and English accents (and Mexican for some reason). 

Sometimes I’ll hear a Brit pronounce a word that makes me think of some famous English person, as in: “oh, he just said ‘luf’ for ‘love’, the way Paul McCartney would.” 

And any time I heard a little kid with a British accent, I just think they’re a great child actor.