That's Not English (13 page)

In which we recognize the difference between American- and English-style self-deprecation.

S
ticks and stones may break your bones, but words can get you into real trouble. Whether you mean to insult or compliment, you’d better first make sure that the word you choose means what you think it means. For example, if something is cozy and comfortable in England it might be called homely. In America,
homely
means ugly. In England, a muppet is a foolish or incompetent person. In America, a muppet is a character from the beloved TV show by Jim Henson. Someone (or something) described as scrappy
in England is untidy or poorly organized, whereas in America, someone who is scrappy is determined to win or achieve something, often in spite of mitigating circumstances. In America,
scrappy
is a compliment that carries the connotation of the underdog.

There is something unseemly about American-style scrappiness to the English—it smacks of trying too hard—but England has a well-deserved reputation for loving and supporting the underdog, especially in sport (a word the English do not automatically pluralize, as Americans do). Although the English claim to have invented every sport worth playing, these days they are tops only at cycling. They have become used to their players being underdogs at nearly everything else. So when an English athlete or team wins, there is a bit of hand-wringing in the lead-up to the victory, followed by unbridled joy. Maybe winning means more to the English than they would like to admit—and who could blame them? The overdog of the nineteenth century is still coming to terms with its reduced circumstances in the twenty-first.

Americans have an international reputation for favoring winners, yet there is not much Americans like more than an underdog. It may be hard for an outsider to square America’s overdog status with an appreciation for the downtrodden, but to Americans it makes sense. A great deal of America’s self-mythology is about overcoming adversity. From the triumph of the American Revolution to tales of pioneers settling the West to prospectors seeking their fortunes in the unforgiving tundra of Alaska, the narrative of the unlikely victory is central to American history. America may be the overdog of the twenty-first century, but the memory of those earlier underdog times is still strong. That’s why Americans prefer their winners to be underdogs, and will often cast a player as an underdog in order to make his win the sweeter. The idea that an underdog competitor is scrappier—that he tries harder—is corroborated by Malcolm Gladwell in his book
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
, in which he recounts stories of
unlikely winners and how their grit and determination, along with an outsider’s perspective, give them a counterintuitive competitive advantage.

In America, unlike England, this love of scrappiness and underdoggery transcends the sporting arena. Americans, individually (though not collectively), like to portray themselves as underdogs, and are apt to share their stories of struggle on the slightest provocation. A successful entrepreneur may confess he is dyslexic. You might find out that someone is still identifying with a formerly persecuted ethnic minority (Italian-American, Irish-American) even though they are the fourth generation born in New Jersey/Boston and their primary connection with that background is Mama’s meatballs/soda bread. A well-off financial consultant might tell you that when he was a child, his parents barely had food on the table the week before payday. From working the night shift to fast-talking their way into a first job in their field to subsisting for months on Top Ramen, Americans are proud—not embarrassed—to tell you what they have had to do to get to where they are. It proves that they are hard and diligent workers, that they are scrappy. (When I moved to New York just after college, I got a second job at a bakery to subsidize my dream of becoming a book editor. I’d spend my weekends selling muffins by day and reading manuscripts late into the night. This lasted until one memorable Sunday when, too tired for precision, I accidentally sliced the tip of my finger off with a breadknife and ended up in the emergency room, in tears of pain but also rather proud of my work ethic.) Americans are always on the make, and they don’t mind who knows it. The self-mythologizing starts early, often long before the college application essays are due. Americans—particularly successful
ones—want to be seen as self-made, to the point of oversharing about their struggles. English love of the underdog doesn’t go quite so far.

In England, to be called scrappy (in the American sense) would not be a compliment at all. There is no shame in being self-made (except to the old-school snob), but there isn’t any glory in it, either. The English are not keen to broadcast their backgrounds and personal history. It would be gauche to be seen to compete, to be seen to care too much about winning, or to ask—or answer—direct questions about one’s origins. Julian Fellowes, creator of
Downton Abbey
, is a particularly keen observer of this English trait. In his novel
Snobs
, he describes a character of the upper class, the Earl of Broughton: “He did not question nor resist his position but neither did he exploit it. If he had ever thought about the issues of inheritance or rank he would only have said that he felt very lucky. He would not have said this aloud, however.” Of another, Lady Uckfield, he writes: “It pleased [her] always to give the impression that everything in life had been handed to her on a plate.”

Even to put out a hand in greeting can feel too pushy for some, like Evelyn Waugh’s Lady Metroland (“Out of Depth”), who “seldom affronted her guests’ reticence by introducing them.” This does not mean that the English are any less curious about the answer to the question “Where y’all from?” than Americans. But because their social conventions prevent them from asking it, they have to rely on clues. When the English meet one another, they engage in a complicated dance. To the outsider they may appear to be talking about the weather, but actually they are doing what dogs do when they sniff one another’s bottoms: They are figuring out if they can be friends.

The song “Why Can’t the English” from
My Fair Lady
may be antiquated, but it isn’t incorrect: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him / The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” Accent is the first—but not the most important—clue. Occupation, education, address, cultural references, and income also count—but all of these things have to be ascertained indirectly. Where there is a large disparity, scrupulous politeness most often rules the day. The smaller disparities are what bring out the withering snobbery that can characterize some of these collisions.

Self-deprecation, the English art of one-downsmanship, often plays a role in the classification ritual. Middle- and upper-middle-class women excel at this, and will bond with one another (or not) by volunteering negative details about themselves, their homes, even their children—defects that usually cannot be discerned by the naked eye. This can be genuine (among friends and equals) or ironic, and sometimes it’s not easy for an outsider to tell the difference. Consider this example. A woman whose children were at school with the Middleton children was quoted by the
Daily Mail
, seeming to compliment their immaculate appearance while denigrating that of her own brood: “Every pristine item of clothing would have a beautifully sewn-in name tape . . . unthinkable that they’d end up resorting to marker pens on labels like the rest of us. There were huge picnics at sports day, the smartest tennis racquets, that kind of thing. It made the rest of us all feel rather hopeless.” Don’t be fooled. By offering evidence that the Middletons cared about appearances, and lavished cash on fancy clothes and kit, this mother is establishing her own upper-class bona fides (secure enough to let her kids look rumpled, and name tags be damned)
while condemning the Middletons as strivers and try-hards of middle rank, at best. If she’d actually considered the Middletons part of her social class, she would not have isolated them from the herd with the telling term “the rest of us.” This brand of irony is usually lost on Americans, for good reason: Who wouldn’t want to be the faultless family at the school picnic? Now you know.

Another notorious diss took place between Tory politicians in 1987, and was recorded by the MP and diarist Alan Clark. Michael (Lord) Jopling, at the time Minister of Agriculture, said of Michael Heseltine, who had recently—and contentiously—resigned from Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, “The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture.” Heseltine was no favorite with the “pinkish toffs” who considered him an “arriviste,” according to Clark, who sneered, “all the nouves [
sic
] in the Party think he is the real thing.” While still an undergraduate, Heseltine was said to have sketched out his life’s goals on the back of an envelope (millionaire by twenty-five; MP by thirty-five; prime minister by fifty-five). He claims no memory of this, but as Decca Aitkenhead reported in
The Guardian
, while Heseltine fell short of his ultimate goal, “the envelope has become parliamentary shorthand for the vulgar hubris of ambition.” Ironically, Heseltine is today as firm a member of the political Establishment as it would be possible to be without having been PM. A footnote: One of Alan Clark’s Tory peers felt his glee at Jopling’s remark was “a bit rich coming from a person whose father had to buy his own castle.”

I don’t mean to give the impression that England abhors the self-made. It’s immodesty that rankles. Those who court publicity, flaunt their wealth, or maintain high profiles risk a strong
backlash. The public fascination with men like Alan Sugar (Donald Trump’s opposite number on the English version of
The Apprentice
) and Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, is not just due to their bootstrapping and vast fortunes, but to their lack of humility. They are upfront to the point of chippiness, as in “chip on the shoulder.” They are brash and indiscreet, and this is why they routinely come in for a bashing by the press. When Branson relocated to his tax-free Caribbean island, Necker, citing health—and not wealth—as his reason, sniping ensued. In the
Daily Mirror
, Brian Reade said, “[He should] change his title from Knight of the Realm to Pirate of the Caribbean.” Still, one gets the sense that Sugar and Branson, and others like them, are polarizing on purpose. They don’t much care what the Establishment thinks and they relish their role in public life. They seem to be having a lot of fun. And I’m fairly sure that neither would take it as an insult if an American called him
scrappy.

In which we close our eyes and think of England.

I
magine for a moment you are learning English as a foreign language. What would you make of words and phrases like
pull
,
snog
,
pick up
,
make out
, and
screw
? Do these sound like events in the World’s Strongest Man competition? Lesser-known Olympic sports? Things that might happen at a Monster Truck Rally? (SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! BE THERE! BE THERE! BE THERE!) Courtship slang in English is anything but dignified. Of course, there are words in English for perfectly innocent activities, like retrieving golf balls from practice ranges, that are just as strange. Does
ball shagging
sound like something it ought to be legal to pay a young boy to do?

Pull
,
snog
, and
shag
are the English synonyms for
pick up
,
make out
, and
screw
.
Pulling
—attracting someone—is the point of a singles night out and “Did you pull?” the morning-after
question among friends, though the word isn’t specific about what the puller and the “pullee” actually did together. In that way it’s similar to America’s term
hooking up
, which can mean snogging or shagging or both. Americans also use baseball metaphors for sex, with first base, second base, third base, and fourth base corresponding to increasing levels of intimacy, from kissing to intercourse. The English haven’t tried this with cricket. Given that one game can last up to five days, it’s probably for the best. To fancy someone, in English English, is to have a romantic attraction to him or her. (Heads up, though—you can also fancy some cake, a new pair of shoes, or a cup of tea in a wholly platonic way.) If you chat someone up, you’re probably hoping for a snog. A less precious way to communicate attraction for someone of either sex is the English equivalent of a wolf whistle (and about as welcome):
Phwoarr!

Shag
is a word most Americans know from Mike Myers’s series of James Bond spoofs, including
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
.
Shag
is a far coarser word in its native land than one would guess from watching these movies. The sexual humor is so adolescent the films could almost have been written by a teenage boy, if they didn’t contain so many knowing references to popular comedians of the 1960s, like Benny Hill and Peter Sellers. It may be true that the more serious the subject, the more likely the English are to be joking. There is a pervasive pubescent tone to much of English sexual politics. In what other country could you put a topless woman on page three of a daily newspaper (the
Sun
is the UK’s bestselling daily newspaper, though the editors of the
Daily Telegraph
like to point out that theirs is the UK’s bestselling
quality
daily newspaper) and have it be considered, in the words of
Sun
editor Dominic Monahan,
an “innocuous institution”? Don’t fret, America, it’s not as smutty as it sounds. One of page three’s models, Peta Todd, has said, “You’d struggle to find anything very sexual on Page 3, it’s quite kitsch. If the picture is too sexy, if it’s not smiley, the people who get the most upset are the
Sun
readers.” Not that Americans are so mature. They are the ones who made the Austin Powers series such a hit in the first place, and they think underwear models are even sexier when they are wearing huge angel wings.

When it comes to dating, there are some major differences in approach. Americans are more likely to go on casual dates with people they have just met. Some dating experts even advocate a “one-date rule”—in other words, always saying yes to a first date, regardless of your first impression of a person, because
you never know
. When Americans meet someone they want to get to know better, they will not necessarily stop seeing other people—until they have had “the talk” in which they decide to become an exclusive, official couple.

Americans are quick to admit interest and slower to commit to a relationship. By contrast, the English are slow to admit interest but much quicker to assume exclusivity once it is requited. An American friend who moved to England described the tortuous line of indirect questioning she would be subjected to—at the end of a party or a night at the pub—by men who had no intention of asking her out on a date. They’d want to know exactly how she came to be there, who her other friends were, what part of town she lived in, and how long she was staying—just for a start. She finally figured out that they were trying to ascertain the likelihood of running into her again without actually making plans with her directly, not out of laziness, but because to
register a particular interest was too high-stakes for them. She would have to run into someone (orchestrated or not, who knows) half a dozen times before he might ask her to dinner. By then, he would assume she wasn’t “seeing” anyone else at the same time. And once they’d had a successful date or two, they’d already be considered an item—even without having an American-style exclusivity talk. She found out the hard way that her casual, American attitude to dating did not translate in England.

These cultural differences seem to run deeper than the usual assumptions about English reticence and American extroversion. In fact, you don’t even have to be on the pull to know this is true. An American or English expat will figure it out just by trying to make friends. About a year after we moved to England, we had a dinner party, and on this night we learned something (other than how much wine people can consume before they become combative or pitch face-first into their pudding—the usual lessons of a London dinner party).

A colleague of my husband’s asked me how I liked London. I said I liked it very much, but was having a hard time getting past initial polite conversations, converting acquaintances into friends. He said he wasn’t surprised, “because England is a small town.” He explained that whether you live in a small town or a large city in England, you rarely have more than a few degrees of separation from people you are likely to date or become friends with: Imagine if everyone you knew from childhood, school, and university ended up in the same handful of places, none of them very far apart. Dating in England is dating in a small town—regardless of whether you are doing it in
Bourton-on-the-Water or Birmingham, London or Leamington. It’s a small country made even smaller by class divisions.

Dating in America is only like dating in a small town if you actually live in a small town, or if you rarely leave your immediate context (your office, your gym, or your apartment block) in a big city. In
Seinfeld
’s “The Pool Guy” episode, George objects to his friend Elaine befriending his girlfriend, Susan, and rants about his “worlds colliding”:

GEORGE:
You have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world, then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. You see, right now I have Relationship George. But there is also Independent George. That’s the George you know, the George you grew up with . . . Movie George, Coffee Shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.

JERRY:
I, I love that George.

GEORGE:
Me too. And he’s dying, Jerry. If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George. A George divided against itself cannot stand!

George may be a particularly vehement example, but this is funny to Americans precisely because many have had a milder version of the same thought. An American would not necessarily expect—or want—all of his friends to know one another. This might seem odd to the English, many of whom take for granted a lifetime’s worth of friends—and the friends of those friends—
living within a few miles and comprising a coherent inner circle. The social risks involved in pulling in an outsider can outweigh the benefits, and even if not, the stakes are certainly higher than they would be in a much bigger country, with a more atomized population, like the United States. This explains why there is so much less random,
You seem nice, let’s have coffee
dating in England. And it is one reason why American expatriates in England can seem so insular. Expat friends are easily made, and the stakes are quite low—people are always moving on, leaving a vacuum to be filled by another new arrival. It’s much harder to cultivate a new English friend who has to run into you at half a dozen gatherings before they feel they know you well enough to commit to a one-on-one meeting. The search for platonic friends takes on a real urgency when you move to a new country, not unlike the search for a life partner. I have come to think of coffee as “first base.” “Second base” is lunch. “Third base” is being invited to dinner at their home, and a home run is when they decide to go all the way and introduce you to their other friends. With any luck, after a while you become close enough that neither of you remembers who pulled whom.