Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Training in Not Being Earnest starts early: among English schoolchildren, there is an unwritten rule forbidding excessive enthusiasm for academic work. In some schools, working hard for exams is permitted, but one must moan about it a lot, and certainly never admit to enjoying it. Even at the most academically-minded establishments, the over-earnest ‘swot’ or teacher’s pet – currently known as a ‘geek’, ‘nerd’, ‘suck’ or ‘boffin’ – will be unpopular and subject to ridicule. Pupils who actively enjoy studying, or find a particular subject fascinating, or take pride in their academic prowess, will carefully conceal their eagerness under a mask of feigned boredom and cynical detachment.

  The English are often accused of being anti-intellectual, and while there may be a grain of truth in this, I am inclined to think that it is a slight misinterpretation: what looks like anti-intellectualism is often in fact a combination of anti-earnestness and anti-boastfulness. We don’t mind people being ‘brainy’ or clever, as long as they don’t make a big song-and-dance about it, don’t preach or pontificate at us, don’t show off and don’t take themselves too seriously. If someone shows signs of any of these tendencies – all unfortunately rather common among intellectuals – the English respond with our cynical national catchphrase ‘Oh, come off it!’ We may use whatever slang equivalent is currently favoured, such as ‘Get over yourself’, ‘Oooh – get you!’ or ‘Could he be more up himself?’ (often muttered under our breath, as is our custom, rather than addressed directly to the speaker), but the meaning is the same.

  Our instinctive avoidance of earnestness results in a way of conducting business or work-related discussions that the uninitiated foreigner finds quite disturbing: a sort of offhand, dispassionate, detached manner – always giving the impression, as one of my most perceptive foreign informants put it, ‘of being rather underwhelmed by the whole thing, including themselves and the product they were supposed to be trying to sell me’. This impassive, undemonstrative demeanour seems to be normal practice across all trades and professions, from jobbing builders to high-price barristers. It is not done to get too excited about one’s products or services – one must not be seen to care too much, however desperate one may in fact be to close a deal: this would be undignified. The dispassionate approach works perfectly well with English customers and clients, as there is nothing the English detest more than an over-enthusiastic salesman, and excessive keenness will only make us cringe and back off. But our unexcitable manner can be a problem when dealing with foreigners, who expect us to show at least a modicum of enthusiasm for our work, particularly when we are trying to persuade others of its value or benefits.

  Irony and Understatement Rules

  The English predilection for irony, particularly our use of the understatement, only makes matters worse. Not only do we fail to exhibit the required degree of enthusiasm for our work or products, but we then compound the error by making remarks such as ‘Well, it’s not bad, considering’ or ‘You could do a lot worse,’ when trying to convince someone that our loft conversions or legal acumen or whatever are really the best that money can buy. Then we have a tendency to say, ‘Well, I expect we’ll manage somehow,’ when we mean ‘Yes, certainly, no trouble’, and ‘That would be quite helpful,’ when we mean ‘For Christ’s sake, that should have been done yesterday!’, and ‘We seem to have a bit of a problem,’ when there has been a complete and utter disaster.

  It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realise that when the English say, ‘Oh, really? How interesting!’ they might well mean ‘I don’t believe a word of it, you lying toad.’ Or they might not. They might just mean ‘I’m bored and not really listening but trying to be polite.’ Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested. You’ll never know. There is no way of telling: even the English themselves, who have a pretty good ‘sixth sense’ for detecting irony, cannot always be entirely sure. And this is the problem with the English irony-habit: we do sometimes say what we mean, but our constant use of irony is a bit like crying wolf – when there really is a wolf, when we do mean what we say, our audience is not surprisingly somewhat sceptical, or, if foreign, completely bewildered. The English are accustomed to this perpetual state of uncertainty, and as J. B. Priestley says, this hazy atmosphere in which ‘very rarely is everything clear-cut’ is certainly favourable to humour. In the world of work and business, however, even one of my most staunchly English informants admitted that ‘A bit more clarity might be helpful,’ although, he added, ‘We seem to muddle through well enough.’

  A kind reader sent me a wonderful article about English irony and indirectness from, of all unlikely sources, the medical journal Pediatric Pulmonology, in which researchers report on a study of how Dutch professionals (but it could equally apply to most other nationalities) frequently misunderstand their English colleagues and employers. The study, based on interviews and tests in which Dutch and English subjects were asked to explain the meanings of common English phrases and expressions, confirms my view that when the English say, for example, ‘With the greatest respect’, foreigners not unreasonably assume that the speaker respects them or their views, when in fact the message is ‘You must be a fool.’ I would add that ‘With all due respect’ is often an even greater insult, as there is a convenient ambiguity, in the expression itself, regarding how much respect might actually be ‘due’.

  The researchers note that when the English say, ‘I’m sure it’s my fault . . .’ foreigners naturally assume that we mean exactly this, when in fact we are just as likely to mean ‘It’s your fault!’ I would add that the ‘I’m sure’ is nearly always a dead giveaway. When the English preface a statement with ‘I’m sure’, we generally mean the exact opposite of what we say. Similarly, a statement prefaced with a casual ‘Oh, by the way . . .’ is taken by foreigners to indicate an unimportant afterthought, when to the English it may well mean ‘Pay attention, this is the primary purpose of our whole conversation.’

  It is worth noting here that while the two Dutch co-authors of this paper charitably put this ‘indirectness’ down to the ‘gentleman-like, polite nature’ of the English, their English co-author attributes it to our ‘utter dishonesty’. A typical example of unpatriotic English self-deprecation, perhaps, but he has a point. English politeness almost always goes hand-in-hand with English hypocrisy.

  An Indian immigrant, who has been valiantly trying to do business with the English for many years, told me that it took him a while to get to grips with English irony because although irony is universal, ‘the English do not do irony the way Indians do it. We do it in a very heavy-handed way, with lots of winks and raised eyebrows and exaggerated tones to let you know we are being ironic. We might say, “Oh yes, do you think so?” when we don’t believe someone, but we will do it with all the signals blazing. In fact, most other nations do this – give lots of clues, I mean – in my experience. Only the English do irony with a completely straight face. I do realise that is how it should be done, Kate, and, yes, it is much more amusing – Indian irony is not funny at all, really, with all those big neon signs saying, “Irony” – but, you know, the English can be a bit too bloody subtle for their own good sometimes.’

  Most English workers, however, far from being concerned about the difficulties it poses for foreigners, are immensely proud of our sense of humour. In a survey conducted by a social psychologist friend of mine, Peter Collett, experienced Euro-hopping British businessmen perceived the business climate in this country to be more light-hearted and humorous than in any other country in Europe, except Ireland (it was not entirely clear whether we felt the Irish had a better sense of humour, or just that we found them funnier). Only the Spanish even came close to matching us, and the poor Germans got the lowest humour-score of all, reflecting the popular stereotype in this country that Germans have absolutely no sense of humour – or perhaps that we find them difficult to laugh at, which is not quite the same thing.

  THE MODESTY RULE – AND THE ‘BUMPEX’ S
CHOOL OF ADVERTISING

  A further potential impediment to the successful conduct of business is the English modesty rule. While the English are no more naturally modest or self-effacing than other cultures – if anything, we are inclined to be rather arrogant – we do put a high value on these qualities, and have a number of unwritten rules prescribing at least the appearance of modesty. Perhaps the modesty rules act as a counter-balance to our natural arrogance, just as our courtesy rules protect us from our aggressive tendencies? Whatever their source, the English rules forbidding boastfulness, and prescribing a modest, unassuming manner can often be at odds with modern business practices.

  I was once asked, as the official anthropologist of the horseracing ‘tribe’, to talk to a group of English racecourse owners and managers about how they might generate more business. I suggested that they could perhaps do more to publicise the unique social attractions of racing – the sunny ‘social microclimate’ of racecourses. With a look of horror, one of the racecourse managers protested, ‘But that would be boasting!’ Trying to keep a straight face, I said, ‘No, I think nowadays it’s called “marketing”,’ but the modesty rule proved stronger than any of my arguments, and he and a number of his colleagues remained unpersuadable.

  That is an extreme example, and most English business people would now laugh at this old-fashioned attitude, but there are still some traces of this mindset in the majority of English businesses. While most of us would not go to the extreme of rejecting any kind of marketing effort as ‘boasting’, there is a near-universal distaste for the ‘hard sell’, for ‘pushiness’, for the sort of brash, in-your-face approach to advertising and marketing that the English invariably describe, in contemptuous tones, as ‘American’. As usual, this stereotype reveals more about the English than it does about the maligned Americans: we like to think that our approach to selling things is more subtle, more understated, more ironic – and certainly less overtly boastful.

  And, on the whole, it is. As I have said before, we do not have a monopoly on these qualities, but they tend to be more pervasive here than in other cultures, and we take them to greater extremes, particularly in our approach to advertising. The most striking example of this was a series of television advertisements for Marmite81 in which people were shown reacting with utter revulsion – to the point of gagging – to even the faintest trace of a Marmitey taste or smell. The campaign was so successful that Marmite have been running variations on the same theme ever since. In 2012, for example, Marmite was repackaged as ‘Ma’amite’ to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, but in the accompanying ads, even a dog (a royal corgi, of course) turns up his nose at a piece of toast spread with Marmite – and then emphasises his disgust by cocking a leg and urinating on it. It is well known that Marmite is something one either loves or hates, but an advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust some people feel for your product strikes many foreigners as somewhat perverse. ‘You couldn’t get away with that anywhere else,’ said an American informant. ‘I mean, yes, I get it. People either love Marmite or find it disgusting, and as you’re never going to convert the ones who find it disgusting, you might as well make a joke out of it. But an ad with the message “some people eat this stuff but a lot of people can’t even bear the smell of it”? Only in England!’

  The humorist George Mikes claimed in 1960 that ‘All advertisements – particularly television advertisements – are utterly and hopelessly un-English. They are too outspoken, too definite, too boastful.’ He suggested that instead of ‘slavishly imitating the American style of breathless superlatives’ the English should evolve their own style of advertising, recommending, ‘Try your luck on Bumpex fruit juice. Most people detest it. You may be an exception,’ as a suitably un-boastful English way of trying to sell a product.

  This was clearly intended as a bit of comic exaggeration, a caricature of a stereotype, and yet, over fifty years on, the avoidance of breathless superlatives is now the norm in English advertising, and Marmite’s highly successful advertising campaign has precisely the same message as Mikes’s fictitious Bumpex brand. The resemblance is uncanny: the ad agency might have taken their brief directly from Mikes’s book. This suggests to me that his main point, that advertising itself is essentially un-English, and would have to be radically reinvented to comply with English modesty rules, is also much more than just an amusing exaggeration. He was quite right, and spookily prophetic. Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and selling, is almost by definition boastful – and therefore fundamentally at odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.

  For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive effect: advertising does not fit our system of values, so, rather than abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to comply with the modesty rule. The witty, innovative advertising for which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve our modesty.

  We English can blow our own trumpet if we have to; we can put on displays of heartfelt, gushing enthusiasm for our products or services, but the anti-boasting and anti-earnestness rules mean that many of us find this unseemly and acutely embarrassing, and we tend therefore to be somewhat unconvincing. And this problem is not just a feature of the higher echelons of English work: I found that workers at the bottom of the social scale are no less squeamish or cynical about trumpet-blowing than the educated middle- and upper-middle classes.

  THE POLITE PROCRASTINATION RULE

  Although the rules governing initial workplace encounters allow us to sidestep the problems normally posed by the no-name rule and the handshake dilemma, that’s pretty much where the reassuring formality ends and the potential for embarrassment begins.

  For a start, as soon as the initial introductions are completed, there is always an awkward period – usually lasting around five to ten minutes, but it can often take up to twenty – in which all or some of the parties feel that it would be rude to start ‘talking business’ straight away, and everyone tries to pretend that this is really just a friendly social gathering. We procrastinate politely with the usual weather-speak, enquiries about journeys, the obligatory wryly humorous traffic-moan, courteous comments on the host’s excellent directions and rueful jokes about one’s own poor navigation skills, interminable fussing over tea and coffee – including the usual full complement of pleases and thank-yous, appreciative murmurs from the visitors and humorously self-deprecating apologies from the host, and so on, and on.

  I always find it hard to keep a straight face during this ‘polite procrastination’ ritual, because I am reminded of images from wild-life documentaries in which we see birds and other creatures engaging in ‘displacement activity’ – turning aside and nervously pecking at the ground or grooming themselves when they are in the middle of a confrontation over territory or mating rights or something. In tense, hostile situations, animals often perform these meaningless ‘displacement’ routines, as a kind of coping mechanism. It is much the same with the English in business meetings: the whole process of doing business makes us uncomfortable and embarrassed, so we distract ourselves and attempt to delay things by performing a lot of irrelevant little rituals.

  And woe betide anyone who dares to cut short our therapeutic pecking and fussing. A visiting Canadian businessman complained, ‘I wish someone had warned me about this earlier. I had a meeting the other day and they’d all been dithering and talking about the weather and making jokes about the M25 for what seemed like half an hour, so I suggested maybe we could get started on the contract and they all looked at me like I’d farted or something! Like, how could I be so crass?’ Another told me he had worked in Japan and been invited to participate in tea ceremonies ‘but there you are either having a tea ceremony or you are doing business. They don’t try to pretend the business meeting is really a tea party,
like you do here.’

  THE MONEY-TALK TABOO

  ‘But why?’ asked another mystified foreigner – an Iranian immigrant with whom I was discussing the ‘polite procrastination’ rituals. ‘You are right, this is exactly how they behave. It takes forever. It drives me crazy. But why do they do this? What is the matter with them? Why are they so reluctant to get down to business?’

  Good question – to which I’m afraid there is no rational answer. The English find ‘doing business’ awkward and embarrassing at least partly because of a deep-seated but utterly irrational distaste for money-talk of any kind. At some stage, business-talk inevitably involves money-talk. We are comfortable enough, allowing for our usual social inhibitions, with most of the other aspects of business discussions. As long as boasting or earnestness are not required, we’ll talk reasonably happily about the details of the product or project, and pragmatic issues such as objectives, what needs to be done, how, where, by whom and so on. But when it comes to what we call ‘the sordid subject of money’, we tend to become tongue-tied and uncomfortable. Some of us cover our embarrassment by joking, some by adopting a blustering, forthright, even aggressive manner; some become flustered and hurried, others may be over-polite and apologetic, or prickly and defensive. You will not often see an English person entirely at ease when obliged to engage in money-talk. Some may appear brash and bullish, but this is often as much a symptom of dis-ease as the nervous joking or apologetic manner.

  A frustrated American immigrant told me that she had ‘finally figured out that it is best to do all the financial negotiating in letters or emails. The English just can’t talk about money face to face, you have to do it in writing. In writing they’re fine – they don’t have to look you in the eye and they don’t have to say all those dirty words out loud.’ As soon as she said this, I realised that this is exactly how I have always managed to get round the problem myself. I am typically, squeamishly English about money, and when negotiating fees for consultancy work or speaking engagements, or trying to get research funding, I will always try to put all those dirty words – money, cost, price, fees, payment, etc. – in writing rather than say them face to face or even on the telephone. (To be honest, I don’t even like writing them, and usually try to cajole my long-suffering co-director into doing all the negotiating for me – with the feeble excuse that I am useless at maths.)