Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Tea. How it Happened to an American.

   [published on August 17, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles"]

          When I was growing up, ‘hot tea’---so-called to distinguish it from ‘iced tea,’ which is what everyone had at every meal every day---was a drink that you had when you were ill or (if you were a girl) suffering from menstrual cramps. Seriously, that’s all it was: the cure for menstrual cramps.

My mom kept some elderly teabags in a canister for this purpose and for certain types of emotional crises.

At restaurants, you could usually order it. If you did, you got hot (but not boiling hot) water in a little tin pot, a cup with a teabag in it (usually Lipton) and a thin slice of lemon. (Americans don’t put dairy products in tea, hot or iced.) This produced a thin amber-tinted liquid, mainly lemon flavored. It was very good when you had a cold or a cough; it worked for cramps too; maybe the heat produced some sort of muscle relaxation or maybe it was completely psychological. Who knows? Not me.

"God is an Englishman. (He lives upstairs---but we don't mention him)."

  (published on August 12, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles")

With one or two exceptions, all of the English people I’ve personally encountered seem to regard God as if he were a slightly senile Uncle who lives in the attic and whom you must keep around out of common decency until he’s gone but whom you never to mention, also out of common decency.

             “Why not?” I asked.

              “I just can’t,” said my husband. “I don't.  I’m not comfortable talking about these things. I find it tasteless.”

             “Tasteless or distasteful?” I asked sullenly.

            “Both, actually, now that you mention it,” he said. “When people bring up God in the middle of a conversation, I’m embarrassed for them.  I don't know where to look.”

            “As if they were dropping names,” I said, thinking of a line from one of Salinger’s novels (Franny and Zooey? Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters? One of those two.)

The Glaring Game (Part 2)--Nature or Nurture?

[first published in "The Flatland Oracles" on August 11 2005]

The author of Dick Jones' Patteran Pages  has very kindly commented in response to my previous rant to set me straight about a couple of points of distinction between Yanks and Brits.  I had complained at surprising length (I mean that the length was surprising to me personally) of the English deployment of the glare as a weapon of social chastisement.  I was actually on my way to building up--as a separate issue---to a further complaint about the British preference for addressing solecisms by what an English friend refers to as 'polite and tactful indirectness' and I was planning to refer to as 'passive-aggressiveness.'  This note anticipated the issue and sorted it all right out. 

As an Englishman I might be able to help you with the glaring issue. There is an inbuilt assumption amongst the English ....that all sentient beings beyond a certain age (10, 11, 12?) should know, through a combination of race memory & nurture, what is acceptable & what isn't. Amongst their own, when the glare alone fails to communicate (& only deep sleep, advanced drunkenness or, of course, blindness could account for this), a sotto voce murmur of "Not appropriate, old chap/m'dear" would be used. A friend of mine of noble blood said that her Great Aunt employed - with merciful rarity - the word 'unsuitable'. When my friend was on the receiving end of this deadly word (an unequivocal glare gaving failed to register), the mortification was extreme.

I'm afraid that the kind of directeness & candour that you represent as admirable in your fellow Americans would be simply inappropriate in decent society.

'Very accurate,' said my husband, when I read it to him.

(I Know All There is to Know About) The Glaring Game

[first published at "The Flatland Oracles" on August 8, 2005]

  I adore the English. My late husband Don was English and my husband Nick is as well. My best friend is English. I’m as literal an Anglophile as it’s possible to be. But there are some drawbacks.

The English tend to be more diffident than Americans, to apologize more often, and to be much less assertive about their wants. On the other hand….

On the other hand, they still mind when they are unhappy. Of course they do. It’s just that if you’re the cause, you’re less likely to hear about it. Which means that you don’t have the chance to do anything about it.

It took me a long time for me to realize that part of the English idea of politeness is---I’m quite serious----not to complain even when they are unhappy with things. They don’t in general seem to have a program for complaining politely or tactfully. If they complain, they are likely to be extremely blunt and ungracious. In general, though, they register dissatisfaction through indirect/ambiguous signals that it’s quite possible to overlook or misinterpret, even for other English people.