That's Not English

by Erin Moore

  There is no consensus in America about what breakfast should be, unless you count the “complete breakfast!” that sugary cereals are said to be “part of” in TV commercials: cereal (Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs), orange juice, toast, eggs, bacon, and fruit, which looks more like a hotel buffet than the average American kitchen table on a weekday morning. America’s regional variations are a bit more diverse than England’s. A typical Southern breakfast will include grits (ground hominy—dried corn kernels treated with lye). In Pennsylvania they like their scrapple (a loaf made of pork scraps and cornmeal, sliced and fried). In New York, lox and bagels with cream cheese are ubiquitous. In the Southwest, huevos rancheros (eggs with salsa, bell peppers, refried beans, and tortillas) are just the thing for the morning after the night before. Most cities in America, if they don’t have a famous local doughnut shop, will at least have Dunkin’ Donuts or, even better, Krispy Kreme. Both chains have established a beachhead in England, where there is no native doughnut brand, though jam-filled doughnuts (of the type that originated in Germany) are widely available. Americans share the English love of pork products, and artisanal sausage-making has become a feature of farmers’ markets and gourmet groceries, but in most of America if someone asks you your favorite sausage, they are really asking, “links or patties?,” referring to the shape of sausage you prefer—small and cylindrical, or burger-shaped.

  Still, the classic American breakfast—when regional differences are accounted for—is the diner breakfast. The kind where you order three scrambled eggs and get six. The kind that comes with a “side” of pancakes, as if the eggs and bacon and hash browns weren’t going to cut it. Because Americans love a sugary breakfast, and no restaurant seems to get this quite like the American chain diner Denny’s. One of their latest menu items is the Peanut Butter Cup Pancake Breakfast, which starts with two chocolate and white chocolate chip buttermilk pancakes, topped with hot fudge and drizzled with “peanut butter sauce.” They come with two eggs, hash browns or grits, bacon or sausage, and warm syrup. If this doesn’t prove Americans have no sense of propriety when it comes to breakfast, I don’t know what does. Perhaps this review of Denny’s Apple Pie French Toast, by a blogger named Erin Jackson from San Diego: “The Apple Pie French Toast struck me as a pretty fantastic idea . . . On top of a thick-cut slice of French toast, there’s a large spoonful of apple crisp (baked apple slices topped with a brown sugar and butter-heavy crumble), a drizzle of caramel sauce, and some powdered sugar. You get syrup on the side, but . . . if you’re going to add anything, make it the last few bites of ice cream from your deep-fried pancake ball sundae.”

  Americans, perhaps alone among England’s international tourists, do not find the full English breakfast a daunting amount of food. Even though, like the English—truth be told—on a typical day at home they either skip breakfast or pick up a muffin or egg sandwich to eat al desko. Something everyone can agree is a “proper” breakfast in neither sense of the word.

  OK

  In which American earnestness and moral relativism are shown to be two sides of the same coin.

  The Miss USA pageant has been one of America’s apple-pie events for more than sixty years. True, the television ratings aren’t what they used to be, but with Donald Trump taking over, you can bet that even if the hair doesn’t improve, the numbers will. In 2013, five million jaws dropped when Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, flamed out in the Q&A. The question was about women earning less than men. What did this say about American society?

  “I think we can relate this back to education, and how we are continuing to try to strive to . . .” She hesitated. “. . . figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem and I think especially the men are, uh, seen as the leaders of this, so we need to try to figure out how to create education better so that we can solve this problem.”

  Wags were quick to point out that her home state has the lowest per-pupil spending on education in the nation—quite a distinction. In the aftermath, having lost the pageant to Miss Connecticut, Powell claimed to be grateful for the learning experience: “For myself, just being able to realize that it’s OK to be human, it’s OK to make mistakes,” she said. “Get back up and keep pushing forward and I think that’s a lesson I can share with a lot of people which I’m really grateful for.” Her response is so American that I would almost argue she deserves the crown.

  There was a lot of predictable snark on the next day’s talk shows, blogs, and drive-time radio. This quickly gave way to hand-wringing over whether it was “OK” to laugh at Miss Utah’s expense, which is even more American. The English would never ask a question like that, because they aren’t as earnest as Americans. Americans are really earnest—in a way that the English find faintly ridiculous. So while Americans laugh at Miss Utah, they will feel somewhat guilty and wonder if it’s OK to do so. They will come to the conclusion that it is OK, as long as it’s all in fun, just as Miss Utah will decide that her humiliating gaffe was OK, as long as she (and others!) learned from it.

  You could be forgiven for thinking that Americans have a monopoly on OK, but of course they don’t. OK is used worldwide and has analogues in many languages. Many nations have claimed credit for inventing it, and some of their stories are compelling, but I’m sorry to report that the truth is rather prosaic. In his book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, Allan Metcalf lays out a convincing case that OK first appeared as a lame joke in the Boston Morning Post in March 1839. It was a deliberately incorrect abbreviation for “all correct.” This used to be common knowledge; over time, OK shed its origin story, along with its American accent. It belongs to Globish—not English—now. But, Metcalf argues, OK means something more to Americans than it does to the rest of the world. It amounts to a two-letter philosophy of life, expressing Americans’ “pragmatism, efficiency, and concern to get things done by hook or by crook.”

  To this, I would add Americans’ essential sincerity. An American and an Englishman might arrive at the same decision, but they do so in a different spirit. The English “muck in”; Americans “help out.” The English are resigned; Americans are accepting. The English “mustn’t grumble” but Americans “turn lemons into lemonade.” Americans are known for “taking it easy.” They just say “OK.” It is a common American conversational tic to append “OK?” to the end of a sentence. “I’m just going to park here for a minute, OK?” “I’m going to open another bottle of wine, OK?” “I’m just going to send my kids over to your house while I run to the store, OK?” The saying “I’m OK, you’re OK” originated as a self-help book title in America and it remains in the culture decades later because it captures something essential about how Americans think and act.

  Americans can be moral relativists, but they also want to be liked. They want to do what they want to do, but they feel obligated to justify it to everyone else. Whatever they want, if they want it bad enough, must by definition be “OK.” They apply the same logic to everyone else. The Baby Boomers pioneered “if it feels good, do it,” but they could accomplish only so much before the Internet. The current generation—of which Miss Utah is one—are raising self-justification to a high art. In their song “It’s OK in the USA,” the band Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse sing, “It’s OK to be fat. It’s OK to be loud / OK to be dumb. It’s OK to be proud / And if you think your cat’s a gourmet, it’s OK.” That about covers it.

  Americans are believers—not just in a religious sense but in the sense of going wholeheartedly down the path they have chosen. This is not always the right path. A high tolerance for mavericks and overconfidence goes with the territory. True genius erupts from this ethos—Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett—but so do crazy loners with guns and the courage to carry out their plans. No place does home-turf nutjobs like America. American earnestness comes at a price.

  The English, by contrast, are natural skeptics, but they, t
oo, have a high tolerance for difference and tend to like people who are what they call “bloody-minded.” Those who are “bloody-minded” are perverse, contrary, or stubborn, but the original and literal meaning was “bloodthirsty and inclined to violence.” No wonder the two countries remain political allies. Former prime minister Tony Blair was loved—and hated—in equal measure by the English for his American-style charisma and overconfidence. He lent President Bush a bust of Winston Churchill shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, as if to assure Bush that they were in it together, for better or worse. Churchill—with his just war and his “never, never, never give up”—was a high compliment to an American president contemplating a war of his own. Churchill also said that one could “always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else,” but it’s probably safe to say that wasn’t the quote on Blair’s mind at the time.

  The two nations went wholeheartedly down their path to war, and we all know how that turned out. In a television interview shortly after his presidency ended, Bush admitted that the flawed case for war in Iraq was his “biggest regret,” saying, “That’s a do-over that I can’t do.” But in the end, “The thing that’s important for me is to get home and look in that mirror and say, ‘I did not compromise my principles.’”

  Unlike Miss Utah, he appears to have learned nothing. But at least he’s OK with it.

  Whinge

  In which the existence of the English “stiff upper lip” is called into question.

  Mustn’t grumble” is a phrase as much associated with the English as “keep calm and carry on” or “keep a stiff upper lip.” Like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who insists, upon having both arms cut off by King Arthur, that “’tis merely a scratch!” the English have a reputation for stoicism. So you might not expect that a word meaning “peevish complaint” has been in consistent use among them since the 1500s. That word is whinge—and actually, the English themselves would be the first to tell you that the stiff upper lip is not much in evidence anymore. The English grumble all the time. They make rather a point of it. Matthew Engel, writing for the Financial Times Magazine, identified “the Grumble” as a great British institution, noting that the phrase “contains that other very English quality, irony. It can be a disguised grumble. In fact, the English are very practiced and skilful grumblers . . . What they are bad at is complaining . . . They habitually refuse to tackle an issue head-on.” (Interestingly, a common response to “How are you?” in England is “Can’t complain.”)

  Whinging as a word carries with it a whiff of futility. Whinging is a passive occupation, whereas someone who complains might actually expect—and get—results. If you ever accidentally cut someone in a line in England (known as “jumping the queue”), what you’ll hear will be grumbling, whinging, under-the-breath comments, and sighs: the barely audible sounds of half a dozen people deciding, all at once, not to confront you. Whereas an American might just say, “Hey, buddy—the end of the line is over there.”

  Americans, too, are great at whining—but when they want something to change, they complain. The English feel more comfortable with whinging than complaining because whinging is not considered too confrontational or high-maintenance. Whinging requires nothing more of the person listening than a nod, a shrug, or some other mild form of agreement. This can frustrate attempts to help them. On the BBC’s consumer affairs call-in program, You and Yours, hosts Winifred Robinson and Peter White spend a substantial portion of each show trying to figure out—often cutting people off midwhinge—what their callers actually want them to do. For callers to a consumer affairs radio show, they are surprisingly unfocused on solving their problems and seem content with merely being heard. Still, England needs a show like You and Yours, as it focuses attention on the more egregious lapses in service by English companies.

  Customer service is not what it might be in England—an obvious and boring observation on a par with saying that there is a lot of water in the Atlantic. In an article for The New Yorker, “Take It or Leave It,” the English author Zadie Smith, who lives in New York, compares the American word takeout (which she defines as food that a restaurant “intends to take out and deliver to someone,” though many Americans would be more likely use the word delivery) with England’s word, takeaway, which implies the eater should “come and take away your own bloody food, thank you very much.” Smith prefers the American model, but takes issue with Americans’ most common complaint about England: “I’m not going to complain about Britain’s ‘lack of a service culture’ . . . I don’t think any nation should elevate service to the status of culture. At best, it’s a practicality, to be enacted politely and decently by both parties, but no one should be asked to pretend that the intimate satisfaction of her existence is servicing you, the ‘guest,’ with a shrimp sandwich wrapped in plastic.” But “intimate satisfaction” seems to me to be a vast overstatement of Americans’ expectations when it comes to service. Politeness and decency is really what it’s about—and being made to feel appreciated as a customer. Being treated well as a customer, one feels inspired—or at the very least obligated—to respond in kind, and ideally, respect and appreciation are mutually reinforced. Is that too much to ask?

  Service people in England tend to regard customers with suspicion. In most English shops, the assumption that “the customer is always right” is nonexistent, even laughable. This raises any store with great service to the level of consumer nirvana. These few, exceptional stores are celebrated, never taken for granted as they might be in America. One example is the chain department store John Lewis. An American who shall remain nameless bought the wrong size sheets (easy to do, as standard US and UK bed sizes differ by several inches), discovering the mistake only after discarding all the packaging and attempting to make the bed. He put the already-washed sheets back into the John Lewis bag and returned to the store, and the staff actually exchanged them—even sympathized with him. (You have to wonder if the sales assistants in the bed and bath department would have had such a kindly reaction to a woman who’d made the same silly mistake. Which is why I sent my husband to return the sheets.) Sometimes simply being American can work in a consumer’s favor in England. If you are willing to confront an issue politely but directly, people will be so nonplussed that they’ll often give you what you’ve asked for. Whereas whinging would be met with a shrug: “What you want me to do about it, mate?” One could argue that frustrating encounters like that positively require a stiff upper lip, but instead many English businesses and government offices need to display prominent signs saying things like, WARNING: WE WILL NOT TOLERATE PHYSICAL OR VERBAL ABUSE TOWARDS OUR STAFF. All right, then.

  Given how good Americans are at complaining, and the emotional tenor of American life in general, I was amazed to find out that the phrase “stiff upper lip”—so strongly associated by Americans with the English—actually originated in the United States. Historian Thomas Dixon, in his “History of Emotions” blog, relates that the phrase was unknown to British readers as late as the 1870s: “It is a pleasing irony that it was introduced to them in a magazine founded by Charles Dickens, the great master of Victorian pathos and sentimentality. Dickens died in 1870. The following year, his journal All the Year Round carried an article on ‘Popular American Phrases’ in which to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’ was explained as meaning ‘to remain firm to a purpose, to keep up one’s courage.’ Even by the end of the nineteenth century the phrase still appeared in quotation marks, and was sometimes explained as an Americanism.” The phrase came about at a time when life in America was “hard cheese,” as my friend Peter likes to say. The first recorded use of the term was in 1815, when the nation was not quite forty years old, and it continued at least through the time of the Civil War, after which it was discovered by the English. As life became easier in America, this phrase and the implied stoic orientation to life slowly disappeared, in favor of a more emotionally open
and honest style that is taken to extremes today.

  The English were not always known for their stiff upper lips, any more than Americans are now. In the Victorian era and even before, public weeping by men and women alike was considered normal, and outpourings of public grief sometimes accompanied the deaths of public figures. As the editor of Private Eye, Ian Hislop, has observed, “In the 18th Century the word ‘sentimental’ was not pejorative in [England]. It was a term of praise for a person of taste and refinement who displayed their emotions openly. The nation which would become known for its ability to ‘keep calm and carry on’ had yet to appear.”

  This began to change near the end of the nineteenth century. Dixon cites Darwin’s pioneering study, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which “popularized a racial hierarchy of emotional expression, with restrained Englishmen at the top and primitive ‘savages’ at the bottom. Darwin asserted that ‘savages weep copiously from very slight causes,’ whereas ‘Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief.’” The stiff upper lip reached its apotheosis with the wars of the twentieth century. As my father-in-law, who was born at the end of World War II, is wont to say in a crisis: “Worse things happen at sea,” and he is mostly right. But this attitude is not common today, and some who were raised with it have abandoned it as the trait of their parents’ generation. A study (somewhat oddly commissioned by Warburtons Family Bakers) found that seven out of ten people in England greet their friends with a double cheek kiss, six out of ten have wept in public, and eight out of ten cry in front of family and friends. Many have observed that the floodgates seemed to have been opened on or about August 31, 1997, as drifts of flowers were flung in front of Kensington Palace and much of the nation went into a very public period of mourning for Princess Diana. To be sure, not everyone abandoned their stiff upper lips during this time, but those who came out against the outpouring of grief, or admitted to finding it repellent, were all but censored.