by Erin Moore
Wistfulness for the stiff upper lip runs deep in England, as evidenced by the runaway success of the adage “Keep Calm and Carry On.” This poster, with its cheery red background and crown logo, is assumed by many to have been a morale-booster during World War II. In fact, the British government’s Ministry of Information had designed it specifically for use in the event of a Nazi occupation, and when the war ended, thousands of copies were pulped. One of the few still in existence surfaced in 2000, in a bookstore in the north of England called Barter Books. The owners, Stuart and Mary Manley, decided to sell reproductions. As Mary told The New York Times, it evokes a “nostalgia for a certain British character, an outlook.” How the image is being used today reflects the massive cultural shifts since World War II. The image has been thoroughly commodified—on products like mugs, tea towels, posters, pins, and tote bags—increasing in popularity even as the English populace appears less and less likely to heed its message. The situation is ripe for parody, and one alternative design, reading “Now Panic and Freak Out,” seems more apropos.
Americans are equally besotted with the “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme (or, as one parody has it, “Meme meme and memey meme”). They persist in seeing the English in this old-fashioned way, possibly because the English are still quite aloof compared to them, and Americans understandably read this as stoicism. These days, while the English, for example, rarely speak to strangers on trains, feel slightly uncomfortable when someone holds more than one door in a row open for them, and generally give outsiders a wide berth, within their own social circles they can be just as dramatic, sentimental, and maudlin as anyone else. It’s kind of refreshing—at least, you won’t hear me whinging about it.
Bloody
In which we swear—and share—alike.
When Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street was released in 2014, it had the questionable distinction of containing more F-bombs than any other drama—2.83 per minute, a total of 506. Only a documentary about the word itself, appropriately titled Fuck, exceeds it in cinematic history, with 857 instances. But this is far from unusual for American films, in which profane words frequently number in the hundreds. Television tends to have stricter standards. Back in 1972, the comedian George Carlin released an album including a monologue called “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” These days, you can hear all of them on cable, but they remain taboo for network television shows. This has inspired creativity. As Dan Harmon, the creator of Community, told The New York Times, “As a writer, you’re always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk. [Douche] is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years—a thing that sounds like a thing you can’t say.”
The influence of American films and television on English culture is strong. Any English person who hasn’t visited America could be forgiven for assuming that America is one giant cluster-cuss, its citizens dropping F-bombs like Eliza Doolittle dropped her Hs. But this isn’t necessarily so. There is a real puritanical streak in America that is much discussed—but little understood—by the English. It manifests itself in unpredictable ways, like an unwillingness to use seemingly innocuous words (see Toilet) and a certain gentility when it comes to swearing. For example, Americans consider it a big deal when a public figure is caught cussing. After President Obama declared his intention to “find out whose ass to kick” in connection with the BP oil spill, Time magazine published a “Brief History of Political Profanity,” saying that although “the comment wasn’t particularly vulgar . . . coarse language always seems shocking when it comes from the mouth of a President.” Americans—even presidents—use all kinds of language, but in real life swearing retains more of its shock value than you would imagine, if your primary contact with American culture were its movies.
It is not unusual, in the real America, to meet a graduate of the Ned Flanders School of Swearing. “Gosh darn it!” “What the dickens?” “What the flood?” “Leapin’ Lazarus!” Julie Gray, in her blog, “Just Effing,” describes the phenomenon: “I recently said to someone that I’d be shocked as pink paint if something didn’t happen. My mother used to describe either a person or a situation that was going downhill as ‘going to hell in a hand basket.’ My grandmother used to say ‘good NIGHT’ when something surprised or shocked her . . . I don’t know where I picked it up but I will sometimes say ‘H-E double toothpicks’ or ‘fudge.’” Even Nicholson Baker, in his book House of Holes (promisingly subtitled “A Book of Raunch”), has his characters say things like “for gosh sakes,” “golly,” and “damnation” as well as “fuck,” just to keep it real.
Celia Walden, an English woman who moved to LA, described for the Telegraph her realization that Americans “don’t use expletives as much as we do.” She found it refreshing (“I haven’t been cursed at in nearly a year”) and noted that her “new sensitivity” to swearing might be related to having become a mother to a child whom she’d rather “didn’t end up like the tiny mite I once saw fall out of his pushchair in Shepherd’s Bush, look accusingly up at his mother, and calmly enunciate the words: ‘Bloody hell.’ I still wonder whether those were that poor child’s first words.”
No matter what age they start, the English seem far more fluent at swearing than Americans. They are more likely to link colorful language with having a sense of humor than with coarseness or vulgarity. Some even have the ability to make a word sound like a swear when it isn’t. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie once performed a comedy sketch based on the idea that if the BBC wouldn’t let them swear on the air, they’d simply make up their own curse words, “which are absolutely pitiless in their detail . . . and no one can stop us from using them. Here they are:
STEPHEN: Prunk.
HUGH: Shote.
STEPHEN: Cucking.
HUGH: Skank.
STEPHEN: Fusk.
HUGH: Pempslider.
STEPHEN: No, we said we wouldn’t use that one.
HUGH: Did we?
STEPHEN: Yes, that’s going too far.
HUGH: What, “pempslider”?
STEPHEN: Shut up.
Even without making up new words, the English definitely have, and make use of, a larger vocabulary of swears than Americans. Americans mostly find it funny—as if the English were swearing in another language—but Ruth Margolis, writing for BBC America’s blog “Mind the Gap: A Brit’s Guide to Surviving America,” warned them that Americans might find their language offensive: “To get on in polite company, try to avoid . . . friendly-offensive banter. Brits exchange jovial insults because we’re too uptight and emotionally stunted to say how we really feel. The stronger your friendship, the more you can lay into each other and still come away with a warm feeling. This is not how Americans roll. Tell your U.S. pal he’s a moron, a twat or a daft f***, and you likely won’t get invited to his wedding.”
Indeed, there are some words the English use casually that are considered more offensive or insulting by Americans. As Margolis notes, for example, in England one might plausibly tease a friend of either sex by calling them a twat (rhymes with cat) or the four-letter c-word, which is all but unsayable in the United Sates—and which linguist John McWhorter (while not at all against swearing in principle) has lumped in with the n-word as one of Americans’ most taboo. Americans find it really shocking to hear it used carelessly.
There are also words the English use that are actually “swearier”—even less polite—than they sound to the American ear, simply because they are unfamiliar. Hugh Grant gets a huge laugh saying, “Bugger! Bugger!” to express frustration in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but, as Philip Thody describes in Don’t Do It! A Dictionary of the Forbidden, bugger is a term of bigotry and abuse with a long and nasty history: “Rarely used in a literal sense in modern English, and scarcely used at all in the USA, where the term is sodomy . . . It comes, through the Old French ‘bougre,’ from the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to the Greek Orthod
ox Church, whose members were said to be Bulgarians, infected by the Albigensian heresy, and thus tending to practise unnatural vices. Since the Cathars made a special virtue of chastity, it was a shade unfair. However, since in the Middle Ages sodomy and buggery were linked to heresy as well as to witchcraft, it was perhaps only to be expected.” Bugger is also versatile: “Bugger off” means “go away.” “I’ll be buggered” is a general expression of surprise. “Bugger me!” is as well, but it implies a greater degree of astonishment. Similarly, the word sod—used to describe a foolish person, or to tell someone to “sod off” (get lost)—is actually short for sodomite.
Bloody is an all-purpose intensifier that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, once qualified as the strongest expletive available in just about every English-speaking nation except the United States. In 1914 its use in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was hugely controversial. (Later, when a reporter from the Daily Express interviewed an actual Cockney flower girl, she said that Shaw’s dialogue was unrealistic: Neither she nor her fellow flower-floggers would ever have used such a filthy word.) When Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Ruddigore—originally spelled Ruddygore—opened in January 1887, the title caused considerable offense. Ian Bradley relates in The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan that W. S. Gilbert, when approached by a member of his London club who commented that he saw no difference between “Ruddygore” and “Bloodygore,” shot back, “Then I suppose you’ll take it that if I say ‘I admire your ruddy countenance,’ I mean ‘I like your bloody cheek.’” It’s hard to take bloody seriously now, given how often the English use it. This is the risk with any good swear: Overuse it and it loses its meaning. Still, to Americans bloody remains the quintessential English swear, and one of the only ones they have not adopted themselves (except when they’re being pretentious or ironic).
Both countries share a fascination with swears that reference the male anatomy. Americans and the English have dick, cock, and prick in common, but England takes the theme further with pillock and knob, as well as masturbator synonyms tosser and wanker. A commenter named Brian D. on Ben Yagoda’s blog, “Not One-Off Britishisms,” told the story of a group of British engineers from his company, sent to work at Wang Labs in Massachusetts. They were asked to attend a meeting to recognize an employee for outstanding achievement: “It was announced from the stage that this person was a King in the company and so would be presented with the Wang King award. The entire British contingent had to leave the room in hysterics.”
Misunderstandings abound, but one thing is for sure. If you choose to swear, and you want your swearing to be understood on both sides of the Atlantic, you can’t go wrong with the classic, the universal, the little black dress of swears: fuck. As Audrey Hepburn once said, “Everything I learned, I learned from the movies.”
Scrappy
In which we recognize the difference between American- and English-style self-deprecation.
Sticks 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 every
thing 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.