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.
 

On Orwell

I worry about Noam Chomsky dying, because when he’s gone, who will give us trenchant critiques of U.S. foreign policy?

Most days I find myself wishing David Foster Wallace was still alive, because I’m desperate to hear his take on our current world, desperate for him to help make sense of it like he did when he was alive.

I wish George Carlin and Bill Hicks were still alive, because they wrote jokes that kill, the only kind of jokes that matter, and made the absurdity of our times tolerable.

The deaths of Wallace, Carlin, and Hicks all occurred in my lifetime.  As will Noam Chomsky’s.

But I’ve got another hero who was dead before I was born:  George Orwell.  And I don’t find myself missing him—not because I never lost him, but because he's is still commenting on our day and age.

Let’s review: 

Orwell wrote 1984, my favorite novel of all time.  When I was 17, my younger brother gave it to me and said "read this" and changed my life.  It was the best, most absorbing, most riveting reading experience I've ever had.  It’s my favorite book to talk about.  It’s my favorite book to teach.  (Though that's increasingly hard to do because his predictions become more and more true.  I taught it during the Iraq war, and his prescience just about made my head explode.)

Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia, one of my favorite nonfiction books, and maybe my favorite history book of all-time.

Orwell wrote the essay "Politics and the English Language", which is the best essay about writing I’ve ever read.  I always thought you could build an entire composition class around this essay alone, and it'd be a mighty good class indeed.

And of course there’s more:  everyone loves Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London is fantastic, and his description of working in a coal mine made me claustrophobic (just like Melville’s description of standing atop a ship’s mast gave me vertigo).

I wrote mean things about his defense of English cooking, so I want to make it up to him by giving him more love.  When I first got to England, (otherwise known as The Land of Orwell My Favorite English Author), I bought a collection of his essays.  And though I thought it impossible to love him more, I fell for him again and harder than before.

Amongst the many fawning things I could say, I’ll mostly concentrate on the one I mentioned above:  it’s astonishing how relevant Orwell remains.  It's certainly true about this collection of essays; though he was writing in the 30s and 40s, he’ll come out with a killer sentence that could stand as a perfect critique of our times.

Let’s start with this:

“As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”

Iraq war anyone?

Or in from the same essay:

“Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time.” 

That’s the question we asked for the entire George W. presidency.

This one made my jaw drop.  Here’s Orwell reflecting on the standardized tests he had to take as a schoolboy:

“At St. Cyprian’s the whole process was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick.  Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your brain with anything else.  Subjects which lacked examination-value were almost completely neglected.” 

And,

“This business of making a gifted boy’s career depend on a competitive examination, taken when he is only twelve or thirteen, is an evil thing at best.”

Orwell was opposed to high-stakes standardized tests!  He knew that as a twelve year old in the 1920s!  If only we were as smart as the young Orwell . . . because nearly 100 years later, the stakes of high-stakes tests are only getting higher.

O.K. George, you’ve nailed our tyrannical political leaders and you’ve seen through the absurdity of standardized tests.  You were man before your time.  But these days many of us are deeply concerned about the environment.  Surely there must be some sort of eco-Orwell that was decades ahead of his time:

“If we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.” 

Orwell the environmental radical!  Dead on and so well written.  It presupposes The Last Child in the Woods and a whole host of other environmental books.  I just want to crawl inside that quote and rub it all over my body.

George, Big O (sometimes I call him Big O), you’re on a roll.  What can you say about the poor?  About wealth disparity?  We’ve got quite a problem with it here in modern-day America.  Inflation-adjusted wages for the working class are no better than the 1970s, people are chronically underemployed, the rich just keep getting richer.  And somehow the poor get demonized as unreasonable, lazy moochers of the system.  Please, illuminate it for us:

“All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. . . . They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.”

You’re right.  You’re so right.  It’s so obvious.  That’s your gift, to point out a painfully obvious fact that we’ve somehow forgotten.

But I’ve been focusing on your content, George, and we can’t forget the brilliance of your craft.  Your writing seems straightforward and simple, but most people don’t realize how hard it is to write with such clarity, what an art it is.  Let’s think of a good example.  What was that line you had in one of your wartime essays?  When you had a chance to shoot a man who was pulling his pants up on the battlefield?

“I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting him.”

An elegant take on the absurdity of war in one clear, plain-spoken, exquisite sentence.

And to close, let me reiterate how much you’ve meant to me personally.  After David Foster Wallace died, I felt like I’d lost a friend.  It made me realize that our favorite authors are much more than people we just read; they’re companions, fellow-travelers, people we hang out with, folks we know well and who know us back.  So surely you’ve got a quote that crystallizes something I’m struggling with right now.

Let’s see, what’s been on my mind?  I know:  money.  The wealth divide between my friends and me grows every year.  I’ve been a public school teacher too long, I volunteered for too many years, and now I'm seeing the consequences.  It might not have mattered right out of undergrad, but now my friends who are doctors, lawyers, in finance, in sales, etc., all seem to exist in a different financial stratosphere.  And it gets worse every year.

I don’t think I care too much about not having a house, a car, nice clothes, or nice things.  What bothers me is the general assumption that someone with a lot of money is somehow better.  Not better in any specific way, just better as a person.  I do it too.  In a money-driven, late-stage capitalist society such as ours, money tends to become the measure of everything, including human value.  You can’t help but think the rich man has something impressive about him that has turned into a lot of money, and the poor man has something lacking in him that has turned into a lack of money.

I know, I know, that’s not really true.  I know, I should be proud of choosing a career of public service.  I know there might be value in the classes I’ve taught and the students I may have affected.  I intellectually know it’s true.  But viscerally, after four decades of life in a money-obsessed culture, I can’t help the feeling that I’m a bit of a (I hate to say) loser when I still have to live with roommates to pay the rent.

Know what I mean George?  Ever had a similar thought?

“The goodness of money was as unmistakable as the goodness of health or beauty, and a glittering car, a title or a horde of servants was mixed up in the people’s minds with the idea of actual moral virtue.”

Thanks.  It makes me feel better to know that you know.

A Restaurant Quirk

They do a strange thing in U.K. restaurants.  You walk in and get seated, which is normal.  You get your drinks and order your food, which is normal.  Then they cook your food, which is normal.  But once the food is prepared they don't bring it to you immediately. 

They come to your table and ask you if you are ready for your meal.

What!?  You're asking me if I'm ready for my food?  Or course I'm ready for my food!  I was ready for my food when I walked in--that's why I came to your restaurant. 

Who wants to wait longer for their meal?  The food never comes quickly enough.  And when you finally see the waiter walk towards you with the order, it's always the best part of the day. 

Once I asked a U.K. waiter if anyone ever says "no, we're not ready for our food."  He said sometimes.  Must be British restraint.

Now when I'm asked I simply say "We're Americans--we're always ready for our food."