Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  In more recent times, however, the range of potential ‘barrier signals’ has expanded beyond our wildest dreams. Mobile phones, tablet computers, laptops, e-books and other electronic gadgets have given us countless new denial-enablers, new ways to ignore each other, signal our frosty unavailability and cocoon ourselves in a private little world of words and pictures. And iPods give us the perfect excuse to plug our ears and ensure that even the usually minimal sounds made by fellow passengers cannot impinge on our consciousness and remind us of their existence. Now that almost all of us carry at least a mobile phone, we no longer have that heart-sinking moment when we board a tube-train and realise we’ve forgotten to bring any reading material: we can dig out our mobiles and scroll through our text messages, emails, contacts lists, notes and diaries. Yes, this is rather boring, but our primary objective is contact avoidance, not entertainment – and it beats staring at ads, maps and safety notices. Only trouble is, reading mobiles and tablets and so on doesn’t make us look brainy. But as this was a false impression anyway, it’s a very small price to pay.

  The Smoker Solidarity Exception

  In England, as in many other countries, smoking is now banned on public transport and in any ‘enclosed public places’ such as train stations, bus stations, workplaces, pubs, cafes, etc., and has also become increasingly stigmatised as a socially unacceptable act in any context. Smokers are not only vilified for health reasons but also looked down upon for class reasons: smoking is increasingly seen as a lower-class habit, allowing non-smokers to regard themselves as both morally and socially superior. The result is an increasing sense of solidarity among the dwindling numbers of despised and ostracised smokers. All this is true in other countries as well, but for English smokers there is at least one positive outcome: a new exception to the ‘denial’ and contact-avoidance rules. Smokers lighting up outside the entrances to railway stations, or shivering outside office buildings, cafés, etc., often make eye contact with each other (still only briefly – it’s a matter of not studiously avoiding eye contact rather than actively seeking it) and this can prompt a small nod of mutual acknowledgement, maybe even an exchange of tentative little smiles. These are often accompanied by a humorous grimace – an eye-roll with a lopsided lip-shrug that somehow, in a nanosecond, simultaneously conveys mock-ruefulness about one’s ‘filthy’ habit, stoicism in the face of disapproval and discomfort, and defiant solidarity with one’s fellow rebels and outcasts. The correct response, as with ‘how do you do?’, is to repeat the same humorous grimace back.

  These non-verbal exchanges are not necessarily a prelude to actual conversation – for many English smokers, the brief eye contact, nod, tiny smile and nano-grimace cover all that needs to be said – but there is at least the possibility of a humorous-moaning opportunity, which as you know is an established exception to the ‘no talking to strangers’ rule. Before I gave up smoking, I was an avid collector of suitable smoker-moan opening lines, and I have pretended to smoke quite a few times recently to check that they are still current.69 Huddled outside a station entrance on a bitterly cold, wet day, for example, a fellow smoker opened with the standard eye-roll/shrug combo and ‘Nice weather for non-smokers, eh?’ – a jokey variation on the traditional English weather-moan ‘Nice weather for ducks’ or ‘Nice day, if you’re a duck.’ I laughed, and we ended up having a brief amicable moan about the weather and the smoking ban. My contribution, ‘Only about ten per cent of smokers get lung cancer. I wonder how many die of hypothermia?’ got a laugh and the cynical reply, ‘That’s their plan: freeze us to death, save the NHS a few quid’ (note how we had progressed to ‘them and us’ solidarity within a few seconds of meeting).

  Bad weather helps, of course, but is not essential. On an earlier, sunnier occasion, sneaking outside for a cigarette during a long day of radio interviews, I noticed a group of three smokers70 in the doorway of an office building across the street. As I lit up, we did the customary eye-contact/nod/smile/grimace exchange, then one of them beckoned me over with a typical opening line: ‘Come join the leper colony?’ In accordance with the ritual, I mimed ringing a bell – ‘ding-ding’ – as I crossed the street, and we enjoyed a little comradely moan. Later the same day, I snuck out again, and saw a different group of smokers standing outside the same office building. Spotting the perfect opportunity for a ‘control’ experiment, I refrained from lighting up and just stood there, leaning against the wall, drinking my coffee, as though simply out for a bit of fresh air and sunshine. As I expected from many previous such experiments, the smokers glanced at me briefly, noted that I lacked the essential little white ‘prop’ that would allow them to break the contact-avoidance rules, and returned to their chat.

  Of course, smoker solidarity and friendly encounters between smokers are common in other cultures as well – the point here is the dramatic contrast with normal English behaviour. In most other cultures, smokers chatting with strangers are only indulging in one ‘prohibited’ pleasure: here, their sociable chat is ‘illicit’ as well. They are gorging on double portions of forbidden fruit.

  There seems to be an unconscious understanding of a ‘causal’ connection between these two forbidden fruits. I observed that English smokers are significantly more inclined to initiate the non-verbal ritual, and strike up conversations with strangers, in contexts where their marginalised ‘leper’ status is most obvious, such as the entrances to public buildings or workplaces where smoking is prohibited. I noted the very highest degree of sociability among smokers outside the entrances to hospitals, especially among those standing directly under the ‘No Smoking on Hospital Grounds’ sign. In open parks and on random street corners, smokers are considerably more reticent and inhibited. The rule of thumb seems to be that the further you are from a no-smoking area, the less effective your cigarette will be as a facilitator of social interaction. English smokers seem to need that immediate reminder of their ‘outlaw’ status to give themselves permission to break unwritten social rules.

  COURTESY RULES

  Although many of the foreign visitors I interviewed complained about English reserve, they all tended to be impressed by our courtesy. Appreciation of our courtesy/politeness and complaints about our reserve/coldness were also among the most common responses in SIRC’s international discussion-groups and surveys. This apparent contradiction is accurately expressed by Bill Bryson, who is amazed and somewhat spooked by the ‘orderly quiet’ of the London Underground: ‘All these thousands of people passing on stairs and escalators, stepping on and off crowded trains, sliding off into the darkness with wobbling heads, and never speaking, like characters from Night of the Living Dead.’ A few pages later, at another station, he is full of praise for the courteous behaviour of a large crowd of rugby fans: ‘They boarded with patience and without pushing, and said sorry when they bumped or inadvertently impinged on someone’s space. I admired this instinctive consideration for others, and was struck by what a regular thing that is in Britain and how little it is noticed.’

  ‘Negative Politeness’ Rules

  But our much-maligned reserve and our much-admired courtesy are, it seems to me, two sides of the same coin. In fact, at one level, our reserve is a form of courtesy – the kind of courtesy that the sociolinguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson call ‘negative politeness’, meaning that it is concerned with other people’s need not to be intruded or imposed upon, as opposed to ‘positive politeness’, which is concerned with their need for inclusion and social approval. The restraint, cautiousness and contact-avoidance of English public-transport passengers – the standoffishness that foreigners complain about – are all characteristic features of negative politeness. What looks like unfriendliness is really a kind of consideration: we judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy – so we mind our own business and politely ignore them.

  All cultures practise both forms of politeness, but most incline somewhat more towards one than the other. The Eng
lish are a predominantly negative-politeness culture, while the Americans, for example, tend to favour the warmer, more inclusive positive-politeness mode. Although these are crude distinctions, and there are class, regional and other subcultural variations in both types of culture, it seems probable that visitors from positive-politeness cultures are more likely to misunderstand and be offended by the ‘polite’ aloofness of the English than those from cultures that are similar to our own in this respect (according to Brown and Levinson, these negative-politeness cultures also include Japan, certain sections of Indian society and Madagascar).

  Bumping Experiments and the Reflex-apology Rule

  Which brings me to the bumping experiments. I spent many amusing afternoons in busy, crowded public places (railway stations, tube stations, bus stations, shopping centres, street corners, etc.) accidentally-on-purpose bumping into people to see if they would say ‘sorry’. A number of my informants, both natives and visitors, had cited this habit of apologising when bumped as a particularly striking example of English courtesy, and I was fairly sure I had experienced it (and done it) myself – but I felt obliged to do the proper scientific thing and actually test the theory in a field-experiment or two.

  If you would like to try this yourself, it is important to make your bumps appear genuinely accidental, as even the English will not apologise to someone who seems to be crashing into them deliberately. I found that the best method was to pretend to be searching for something in my shoulder-bag: with my head down and hair over my eyes, I could still actually see my ‘target’ and calculate my trajectory to achieve a relatively gentle bump, while giving the impression that I was genuinely distracted by my bag-fumblings.

  My bumping got off to a rather poor start. The first few bumps were technically successful, in that I managed to make them seem convincingly accidental, but I kept messing up the experiment by blurting out an apology before the other person had a chance to speak. As usual, this turned out to be a test of my own Englishness: I found that I could not bump into someone, however gently, without automatically saying ‘sorry’. After several of these false starts, I finally managed to control my knee-jerk apologies by biting my lip – firmly and rather painfully – as I did the bumps. Having perfected the technique, I tried to make my experiments as scientific as possible by bumping into a representative cross-section of the English population, in a representative sample of locations. Somewhat to my surprise, the English lived up to their reputation: about 80 per cent of my victims said ‘sorry’ when I lurched into them, even though the collisions were quite clearly my fault.

  There were some minor variations in the response: I found that older people were very slightly more likely to apologise than younger people (late-teenage males were the least apologetic, particularly when in groups), and British Asians seemed to have a somewhat stronger sorry-reflex than British Afro-Caribbeans (possibly a reflection of the negative-politeness tendency in Indian culture – such apologies being a clear example of politeness that is primarily concerned with the avoidance of imposition or intrusion). But these differences were marginal: the vast majority of the bumped, of all ages, classes and ethnic origin, apologised when I ‘accidentally’ jostled them.

  These experiments would tell us little or nothing about Englishness if exactly the same results were obtained in other countries, so by way of ‘controls’ I diligently bumped into as many people as I could in France, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Poland, Lebanon, Switzerland, Greece, the USA and Albania. Recognising that this would not constitute a representative international sample, I also bumped into tourists of different nationalities (American, German, Japanese, Spanish, Australian, Scandinavian) at tourist-trap locations in London and Oxford. And just for good measure I got friends and contacts in some of these countries, and in Canada and China, to conduct the same experiments in their own countries.

  Only the Japanese (surprise, surprise) seemed to have anything even approaching the English sorry-reflex, and they were frustratingly difficult to experiment on, as they appeared to be remarkably adept at sidestepping my attempted collisions.71 (Canadians were slightly more likely to say ‘sorry’ than other nationalities, but still nowhere near the English percentage.)

  This is not to say that my bumpees of other nationalities were discourteous or unpleasant – most just said, ‘Careful!’ or ‘Watch out!’ (or the equivalent in their own language), and many reacted in a positively friendly manner, putting out a helpful arm to steady me, sometimes even solicitously checking that I was unhurt before moving on – but the automatic ‘sorry’ did seem to be a peculiarly English response. It must be said, however, that the English ‘sorries’ were usually muttered, often barely audible (if you try this experiment yourself, you will have to listen extremely carefully to catch the rapidly mumbled or even whispered ‘sorry’, which may well sound more like ‘sry’ or ‘so-y’) and with no eye contact, smile or other friendly signal.

  George Orwell said that the English are ‘inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes and use probably the foulest language in the world’, but he nevertheless concluded, without contradiction, that ‘The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic.’ As evidence of this, along with the good-temperedness of bus-conductors and unarmed policemen, he cited the fact that ‘In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement.’ Quite so, and if your shove appears to be genuinely accidental, they might even apologise as they stumble into the gutter.

  Since this book was first published (in 2004), I have been surprised by the number of letters and emails I have received from intrepid readers who took it upon themselves to replicate my bumping experiments. Pleasantly surprised, as the results reported by those who managed to bump into a decent-sized sample seem to be much the same as mine – between 65 and 88 per cent of their English ‘targets’ said ‘sorry’ when bumped. So my figure of ‘about 80 per cent’ was clearly not too far off (to my shame, I didn’t always keep count quite as precisely as these diligent readers, although in my defence I have clocked up many hundreds of bumps over the years, whereas their bumping samples were much more limited).

  Female experimenters seemed to receive a higher percentage of ‘sorries’ than males, which may be partly down to a degree of chivalry in the response, but also perhaps because male experimenters reported having greater difficulty in making their bumps appear accidental.

  Also, while one should always be a bit sceptical of survey findings, I was pleased when one recent survey showed 60 per cent of us admitting to saying sorry when we are bumped into or someone treads on our feet, and in another survey 75 per cent of us admitted to saying sorry when bumped. These figures are very slightly lower than mine, but I suspect that quite a few of us (probably at least 5 or 10 per cent) don’t even realise that we do this – I wasn’t even entirely aware that I did myself until I started this research.

  You may be wondering why the English seem to assume that any accidental collision is our fault, and immediately accept the blame for it by apologising. If so, you are making a mistake. The apology is reflex – an automatic, knee-jerk response, not a considered admission of guilt. This is a deeply ingrained rule: when any inadvertent, undesired contact occurs (and to the English, almost any contact is by definition undesired), we say ‘sorry’.

  In fact, any intrusion, impingement or imposition of any kind, however minimal or innocuous, generally requires an apology. We mumble ‘sorry’ if our arm accidentally brushes against someone else’s when passing through a crowded doorway; even a ‘near miss’, where no actual physical contact takes place, can often prompt an automatic ‘sorry’ from both parties. The apology is so habitual and mechanical that we sometimes even say ‘sorry’ when we bump into an inanimate object, such as a door or a lamp-post. I caught myself saying ‘sorry’ when I bumped into an unattended shopping trolley in a supermarket recently, which prompted me to do a quick informal po
ll, in which the majority of English people admitted that they too had often apologised to trolleys, chairs, trees, street-signs . . .

  As noted earlier, we use the word ‘sorry’ as a prefix to almost any request or question: ‘Sorry, but do you know if this train stops at Banbury?’; ‘Sorry, but is this seat free?’; ‘Sorry – do you have the time?’; ‘Sorry, but you seem to be sitting on my coat.’ We also often say ‘sorry’ when we mean ‘excuse me’ (or ‘get out of my way’), such as when asking someone to move so we can get past them. An interrogative ‘sorry?’ means ‘I didn’t quite hear what you said – could you repeat it?’ (or ‘what?’). According to the recent survey mentioned above, we say ‘sorry’ on average eight times a day, with a significant minority who say ‘sorry’ at least twenty times a day – and of course these are just the ‘sorries’ that people actually remember saying when they are asked a survey question. I suspect that the real total, including all the unconscious, reflex ‘sorries’, is even higher.