Enjoyable enough book about what makes the English so quintessentially English. I'm bothered by the lack of scholarly facts; many things are claimed as English while they do exist elsewhere as well. This part is often overlooked.
But I'm learning things I didn't know about, such as the Shipping Forecast.
Right now, have started to read fast-skipping.
The Shipping Forecast ritual illustrates a deep-seated need for a sense of safety, securty and continuity - and a tendency to become upset when these are threatened - as well as a love of words and a somewhat eccentric devotion to arcan and apparently irrational pastimes and practices. There seems also to be an undercurrent of humour in all of this, a reluctance to take things too seriously.
... you should strike up a conversation by making a vaguely interrogative comment about the weather (or the party or pub or wherever you happen to be). This mustnot be done too loudly, and the tone should be light and informal, not earnest or intense. The object is to 'drift' casually into conversation, as though by accident. Even if the other person seems happy enough to chat, it is still customary to curb any urges to introduce yourself.
The 'invasion of prviacy' involved in gossip is particularly relevant to the rather inhibited English, for whom privacy is an especially serious matter. It is impossible to overstate the importance of privay in English culture. Jeremy Paxman points out that "The importance of privacy informs the entire organisation of the country, from the assumptions on which laws are based, to the buildings in whcih the English live." George Orwell observes that "The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosy Parker."
.... privacy rules significantly enhance the value of a gossip.
There is a more or less universal rule whereby people almost unconsciously try to achieve some degree of symmetry or balance in their conversations, such that if you tell someone something about your own 'private' life, the other person will feel obliged, if only out of reflex politeness, to reciprocate with a comparably personal disclosure.
The etiquette governing the print exceptions applies equally to the internet; just because your English Facebook, Twitter or forum 'friends' plaster intimate revelations about their private lives all over the internet does not mean that they will be happy to discuss these matters when you meet them face to face. In fact, they may take great offence if you so much as mention them. The English are by no means alone in finding cyberspace a disinhibiting place, nd this disconnect between online and 'real life' communication applies in other cultures as well.
On their own, men gossip, with no more than five per cent of conversation time devoted to non-social subjects, soch as work or politics. It is only in mixed-sex groups, where there are women to impress, that the proportion of male conversation time deovted to these more 'highbrow' subjects increases dramatically, to between 15 and 20 per cent.
On further questioning, however, the difference turned out to be more a matter of semantics than practice: what the women were happy to call 'gossip', the men defined as 'exchanging information'.
Many of the women complained that men failed to adopt the correct tone of voice, recounting items of gossip in the same flat, unemotional manner as any other piece of information, such that, as one woman sniffed, 'You can't even tell it's gossip.' Which, of course, is exactly the impression the males wish to give.
Although, though, I suspect that English self-mockery is rooted in a rather smug complacency, if not outright arrogance. And this was evident in other aspects of the opening ceremony: there were some globally recognised, positive images of England and the English, but the chaotic display also featured dark, even deliberately ugly, unflattering moments, and was full of obscure parochial references and whimsical in-jokes that were incomprehensible to a global audeince. Indeed, even the most delighted, admiring commentators from other nations found much of it 'baffling', 'odd', 'bizarre', 'impenetrable', 'weird', 'bewildering', 'insane' and 'What the f***?' Others were less polite. The majority of English people loved it, and didn't much care whether the rest of the world understood it or not. In fact, many were probably secretly pleased that they didn't. The degree of self-mockery, self-denigration, obscure self-reference and self-indulgent eccentricity exhibited in that ceremony required a breathtaking disregard for the opinion of others - in this case billions of others - which can only stem from a deep sense of superiority.
Royal events are brief episodes of what anthropologists call 'cultural remission' or 'festive inversion' - like carnivals or tribal festivals, where some of the usual social norms and unwritten rules are temporarily suspended and the English do things we would never normally do, waving national flags, cheering and dancing in the streets, and even talking to strangers.
Is it acceptable to switch your phone back on during the business lunch? Do you need to give a reason? Apologies? Again, my observations and interviews suggest a similar pattern. Low-status, insecure people tend to take and even sometimes make calls during a business lunch - often apoligising and giving reasons, but in such a self-important 'I'm so busy and indispensable' manner that their apology is really a disguised boast. Their higher ranking, more secure colleagues either leave their phones switched off or, if they absolutely must keep them on for some reason, apologise in a genuine and often embarrassed, self-deprecating manner.
Bikes and horses give the inhibited English something to talk about and, even better, an excuse to avoid making eye contact while we do so. We talk 'through' the bikes or hoses, facing them, not each other, looking at them, standing back and admiring them, touching them, asking questions about them.
What exactly do estate agents do? They come to inspect your house, look around it with an objective eye, put a value on it, advertise it, show people round it and try to sell it. What is so terribly offensive about that? Well, everything, if you replace the word 'house' with 'identity', 'personality', 'social status', or 'taste'. Everything that estate agents do involves passing judgement not on some neutral piece of property but on us, on our lifestyle, our social position, our character, our private self. And sticking a price tag on it. No wonder we can't stand them.
... the standoffishness that foreigners complain about - are all characteristic features of negative politeness. What looks like unfriendliness is really a kind of consideration: we judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy - so we mind our own business and politely ignore them.
