by Erin Moore
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.
Pull
In which we close our eyes and think of England.
Imagine 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 quicke
r 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.
Shall
In which a word seldom heard in America still speaks to the English.
Shall has all but disappeared from American English. If an American uses shall it is usually in an effort to sound more formal or to take what the English would call a “softly-softly” approach with someone. Shall survives in the service industry—“Shall I take your coat?”—and in fairy tales like Cinderella: “You shall go to the ball, my dear.”
Shall denotes obligation and necessity rather than choice; it’s the “have to” to will’s “want to.” In everyday speech, shall strikes Americans as having what H. L. Mencken called a “pansy cast.”
Indeed, for the benefit of anyone who isn’t clear on the distinction (you’re in good company), here’s the rule:
For simple futurity, use shall after I or we, but will after everything else:
I shall get help. We shall get help. (Whether we like it or not, help is coming.)
They will get help. (No need to do anything; help is coming.)
To express determination or command, use will after I or we but shall after everything else:
I will get help. We will get help. (My/our intention is to go and get help.)
They shall get help. (They’ve been ordered to go and get help).
It is far simpler to substitute will. What’s more, its connotations of the deliberate determination, rather than inevitability, of the future, chime with Americans’ beliefs about how the world ought to work. It is part laziness, part vigor, that has killed shall in America. If you want to be a stickler about it, any book you consult will likely put the issue of shall vs. will to rest in two pages or fewer. Grammar Girl dispatches it in less than a page, with one caveat: “if you use shall in the British way during normal conversation, you might end up sounding pretentious or haughty.”
In England, it is far more complicated and always has been. One of the more thorough prescriptions for the use of shall vs. will, in H. W. Fowler’s The King’s English, runs to twenty-two pages, and begins with a here-be-dragons: “It is unfortunate that the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen (who will find most of this section superfluous), is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it; and for them, the section is in danger of being useless.” Although social class cannot be conflated with region, as Fowler seems to do here, his point remains: Here are twenty pages’ worth of ways—based on a single word—to keep the lower classes in their place.
In England, no one wants to be seen to try too hard. Skills must come naturally, and seem effortless, in order to count. One mustn’t be a plodder or a swot (grind), but come up with the goods while appearing not to care too much. This is particularly true of intellectual pursuits, but the rule extends to sports. The 1960s comedy duo Flanders and Swann sang of foreigners that “they argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won / And they practice beforehand, which ruins the fun.”
Should an English person appear to make an embarrassing effort, and rise too far above his peers, vulnerability to attack is his reward. “Congratulations!” they’ll say, with knives behind their backs. This is known as tall poppy syndrome, because, as an English friend explained, the tallest poppy is the one you want to cut first.
In America, effort (and, above all, being seen to make an effort) is practically a r
eligion. In a 2011 study by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether success in life is determined by forces outside their control, only 36 percent agreed. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that shall is not really part of Americans’ vocabulary. For them it is all about the individual will.
Americans persist in thinking they can be, do, or have anything they want if they work hard enough. This may not be strictly true in America these days; nevertheless it’s an idea that runs deep in the American psyche and attests to the power the American Dream still holds.
Americans love and celebrate the successful. Not because jealousy doesn’t exist, but because success for one gives hope to all. Nothing feels like a zero-sum game in an enormous country founded on the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The sentiment is I want what she has rather than I don’t want her to have what she has. To the extent that an American believes those who rise above the rest deserve it, he is happy to see them as inspirations for dreams of his own limitless possibilities. After all, he could be next. It is only when he perceives that someone has cheated or swindled his or her way to the top that he sharpens the scissors.
An Englishman without a native understanding of shall vs. will should emigrate to America, where he will have a swell time indeed. If you doubt that Americans project such sterling qualities as authority, a sense of humor, and a refined intellect onto anyone who comes equipped with any sort of British accent, you haven’t been there lately.
The English who are capable of deploying shall without making Fowler turn in his grave may be in the minority, but they are a powerful minority. Should you wish to join them, you might try using a helpful mnemonic devised by William Ward in 1765: