That's Not English (9 page)

In which we detect a common thread of anti-intellectualism running through both countries.

I
’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.”

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

If you ask an American whether it’s good to be smart, he would likely say yes. But ask an American if he himself is smart, and you’re likely to get a deflection. The two examples above came from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, who was an American by immigration rather than by birth and was so smart that his name is synonymous with
genius
, though Americans are far more likely to use it as an ironic insult than a compliment. “Nice one, Einstein!” has followed many a mistake. But while Roosevelt may have been buttering up his cabinet and Einstein
encouraging the masses to try harder, there’s no doubt that Americans have an ambivalent relationship with the word
smart
. Listen to the way they use it, and you might question whether they think being smart is really such a good thing after all:

“I’ve had it with your smart-ass comments.”

“No one likes a smart aleck.”

“Don’t get smart with me!”

In America, it’s perfectly fine to be a show-off if you are a talented athlete, or musician, or entrepreneur, but it’s not cool to be too intellectual. The brightest kids in school are rarely the most liked or popular, and this can last into adulthood if they don’t figure out where braininess is welcome and where it isn’t.

No one wants smart people lording it over them. It’s why people who go to top universities won’t mention them by name in mixed company. “I went to college in Boston” is code for “I went to Harvard, but please like me anyway.” Americans don’t like elitism—and they associate intellectualism with elitism. This has been one of Barack Obama’s recurring challenges as president. His critics look for every opportunity to prove he is, as
The
New York Times
reported, “a Harvard-educated millionaire elitist who is sure that he knows best and thinks that those who disagree just aren’t in their right minds. Never mind that Mr. Obama was raised in less exalted circumstances by a single mother who he said once needed food stamps. Or that although he went to private school, he took years to pay off his college loans. Something about Mr. Obama’s cerebral confidence has made him into a symbol of something he never used to be.” The
Onion
has repeatedly
mined this rich vein of humor, declaring, “Overjoyed civil rights leaders” say that Barack Obama is “redefining who can be smeared as condescending eggheads” now that Americans are “able to look past Obama’s skin color to see the Harvard-educated smart-ass underneath.” By contrast, a lot of Americans considered President George W. Bush kind of dumb—he was known for his malapropisms and loved to brag about having been a “C” student—but they never accused him of being an elitist, even though he graduated from Andover, Yale, and Harvard and came from one of America’s most successful political dynasties. Which likely shows how not-dumb he really is.

The English have a word for a person with that kind of intelligence—
clever
—and it’s not usually a compliment. A common English expression is “too clever by half,” which implies arrogance and overconfidence in one’s intelligence—the kind of display that others find annoying or overbearing. In the popular children’s television program
Peppa Pig
, in which anthropomorphic mammals of many kinds live in the same town (and are all, bizarrely, the same size—from pigs to rabbits and cats, dogs, and even zebras), Edmond, the youngest son in the Elephant family, goes around correcting museum guides’ patter and knows all there is to know about dinosaurs, among other things. Whenever he gives one of his irritating know-it-all speeches, he makes a little trumpeting noise and says, “I’m a Clever Clogs!”
Clever Clogs
is a slightly pejorative name for a person of above-average intelligence and below-average modesty. This joke goes down well in a country where “blowing one’s own trumpet” is simply not done. There might even be a spot of childhood indoctrination going on.

There are two other words in English English that have
similar meanings:
boffin
and
anorak
. An
anorak
is someone (usually male) with an obsessive interest in a niche subject (so named for the none-too-fashionable windbreakers they often wear—think Cliff Clavin in
Cheers
).
Boffin
is a slightly more affectionate term, which originated during World War II as a name for the technical experts, engineers, and codebreakers who helped win the war. Today it is used, as Robert Hutton notes in his book
Romps, Tots and Boffins
, primarily in news headlines about “anyone with a job at a university, a science GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education] or a lab coat.”

In England, like America, playing up your intelligence is just plain bad manners—not because it’s uncool to be bright, or because it’s considered elitist, but because it’s showing off, and as Sarah Lyall asserts in her book,
A Field Guide to the British
, “boasting . . . makes you seem aggressive, ambitious, self-regarding, puffed up—verging on American. The evils of those things are ingrained in them at school, where they are discouraged from saying they are better than anyone else, even when they are.” Even Oscar Wilde, one of the biggest show-offs the British Isles ever produced, knew this. He made valiant attempts at self-deprecation, but never really carried it off, once saying, “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”

Elitism doesn’t sit much easier with the English than it does with Americans, but there is less ambiguity about who can be justly accused of it. Like President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron often has to defend himself against charges of elitism, but he comes from a genuinely posh background and has been criticized for installing many of his Old Etonian chums in key advisory roles and being unprepared to speak for
“ordinary” voters. It’s his bad luck to have been so expensively educated, because if he were choosing to hire childhood friends from the state comprehensive, it would make for better publicity. (An English “state school” is the equivalent of an American “public school,” while in England some elite private schools are called “public.”) Interestingly, Cameron and his wife, Samantha, have declared their intention to send their daughter to a state secondary school, where she can have a “normal” education. Cameron will be the first Conservative prime minister to send a child to a state school while in office.

More visible hierarchies and class distinctions mean that the English can be much more specific and articulate about these tensions and resentments than Americans, and they tend to use humor to defuse them. For example, one reason cleverness has acquired a bad name in England is that middle-class parents are forever harping on about how “bright” their own children are—often by way of excuse for their terrible behavior. Jeremy Hardy imitated a middle-class father in a hilarious rant on BBC Radio 4: “Hermione’s so
bright
, and that’s why she misbehaves, I think. She’s so much
brighter
than the other children, and that’s why she sets fire to them, I think.” There has long been a conviction among the English that clever people are, well, not very
nice
. To be candid, not everyone minds—the English find it more acceptable than Americans to be cruel in the service of wit—but a poem by Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth captures the conflict:

If all the good people were clever,

And all clever people were good,

The world would be nicer than ever

We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow ’tis seldom or never

The two hit it off as they should,

The good are so harsh to the clever,

The clever, so rude to the good!

Dame Elizabeth was the great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth and the principal of Lady Margaret Hall, one of the Oxford colleges, from 1879–1909, when she founded St Hugh’s Hall to educate poor female undergraduates. This was later established as St Hugh’s College, which is today the largest of the thirty-eight colleges in Oxford University. So it would seem she was one of those rare birds, clever as well as good. The last stanza of her poem gives us all reason to hope that clever doesn’t always have to be a pejorative—if we’re smart about it.

So friends, let it be our endeavour

To make each by each understood;

For few can be good, like the clever,

Or clever, so well as the good.

In which ancient conflicts and prejudices continue to make life difficult for English redheads.

I
once read an amusing article about “beauty lag” that compared women’s grooming habits in London, New York, and Los Angeles. The farther west, apparently, the more lacquered and “done” a woman is expected to look. (London: fresh haircut, clean fingernails. New York: blowout, manicure. Los Angeles: all of the above plus highlights, pedicure, and fake bake.) My own experience bears this out. Yet standards of beauty don’t differ much from one side of the Atlantic to the other, with one exception.

A redhead in America will be considered enviable and special, if occasionally subjected to dunderheaded stereotypes about her supposed volatility or fiery temper. Children in the schoolyard will tease anyone for what makes him different, and
red hair is no exception. But American associations with red hair include Charles Schulz’s little red-haired girl—the object of Charlie Brown’s affection in the
Peanuts
comics. She was based on an unrequited love of Schulz’s, and such was his reverence for the character that he never drew her, preferring to let her live in readers’ imaginations. In America, people with naturally red hair (who represent just 2 percent of the population) are widely imitated. Actresses like Christina Hendricks and Emma Stone have inspired a rush to hairdressers.

In England, by contrast, redheads are taunted and ridiculed for life, even subjected to random acts of violence. They are known as “ginger,” which is not merely descriptive but can be a term of abuse. American actress Jessica Chastain told
GQ
that while on location in Thailand, “I’d be walking down the street and people—British people—would stop the car and scream, ‘ginger!’ at me.” English model Lily Cole has also been bullied for her hair color. She told the
Mail on Sunday
: “I remember feeling very insecure. When I’d meet people, I would think they wouldn’t like me—that was an actual thought process—because I’m a redhead. It’s absolutely absurd.”

The dangers of “gingerism” go beyond bullying. Recent reports include a stabbing, a family forced to move twice after their children were teased mercilessly, a woman who won a sexual harassment suit after being targeted for her red hair, and a boy who committed suicide after being intimidated by other teens. These incidents prompted Nelson Jones in the
New Statesman
to ask, “Should ginger-bashing be considered a hate crime?” He argued, “If the concept has any meaning, it should apply irrespective of the personal characteristic, innate or adopted, cultural or sartorial, that inspires the hate.” The
prejudice against this coloring has been likened to racism, and not only in jest, though one of the funnier examples is Australian (redhead) comic Tim Minchin’s song “Prejudice,” in which he sings of “a word with a terrible history . . . a couple of
G
s, an
R
and an
E
, an
I
and an
N
.” His American audiences roar with relieved laughter when the word turns out to be
ginger
. Americans cannot afford to be smug about this, and they know it. Any week of the year, the national news carries evidence that England holds no monopoly on hate, or its related crimes. Yet
ginger
is seldom used, and carries little to no emotional freight, in the United States.

In order to understand this cultural difference, you have to look to a historical antagonism between the English and the Scots and Irish—places with disproportionately high percentages of redheads. The Anglo-Irish War freed the Irish from English rule less than one hundred years ago, and the history of oppression by the English and insurrection by the Irish assured an uneasy peace. Prejudice against the Irish also has a virulent past in America. It arrived with the first settlers from England, and intensified with anxiety over Irish immigration to the United States after the potato famine. As late as the 1800s, Irish-Americans were being compared to apes. Negative stereotypes of them as violent and hard-drinking persisted for much longer.

While many Scots are proud to be part of the United Kingdom, just last year a vocal group—headed by then–first minister Alex Salmond—campaigned for Scotland to end its 307-year union with the UK. On the day of the referendum, voter turnout was higher than in any UK election since 1918, the first time all adults were given the right to vote. Forty-five percent voted “yes” to Scottish independence.

The conflicts between the English and the Irish and Scots may be mostly bloodless now, but they are not forgotten. What is largely forgotten is the context for the English bias against “gingers.” This may be one reason that ginger jokes are considered acceptable in a way that racist jokes about nonwhites would never be. Teasing redheads has become disassociated from anti-Irish or anti-Scot feeling, which is a step in the right direction. But the teasing itself—and the random violence—continues.

Redheads in England have started ginger-positive websites and groups, which seek to take back the term. Bloggers and parenting magazines give advice on raising redheads. A mother-daughter team started to offer support and products. Most are keen to let you know that they do not go in for special pleading—they just want to live in peace. As redhead Ally Fogg wrote in
The
Guardian
, “I’m pretty sure I have never been denied a job or the lease on a flat . . . I haven’t been stopped and searched by police . . . or casually assumed to be a threat, a criminal or a terrorist . . . Nobody wishes to bar me from marrying my partner because she has (peculiarly, I will be the first to admit) fallen in love with a ginger.”

Gingerism may not be tantamount to racism, but I think it’s telling that Fogg couldn’t resist putting a ginger joke into this otherwise serious editorial. In England, pain is most often exorcised through humor. A recurring sketch on the
Catherine Tate
Show
had comedian Tate (a redhead) portraying a character named Sandra Kemp, who goes under police protection to “Russet Lodge,” a safe house for gingers who’ve been victimized. In a later sketch, Kemp starts a campaign group called “Gingers For Justice,” taking a stand against the public, who have ostracized gingers from society.

Even being fourth in line to the throne doesn’t exempt an English redhead from ridicule. Prince William once mocked his brother during an interview, saying that he’s a “ginger . . . but he’s a good-looking ginger so it’s all right.” Will it ever end? Unfortunately, neither England nor America can claim that prejudice—racial or otherwise—is a relic of the past. Maybe we ought to give the last word to a fictional Canadian, Anne of Green Gables, who said, “People who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble
is.”