That's Not English (11 page)

In which we learn that people—and things—can be
proper
without being pretentious.

S
ometimes we’re so busy looking for what we expect to find that we miss what’s actually there. In some ways, Americans and the English are more similar than they think. For example, both nationalities have a preoccupation with authenticity, and they don’t like pretension. These are characteristics we would do well to understand—and appreciate—about each other. The English have a way of describing something that is genuine, bona fide, and thoroughly of its kind:
proper
. (“Fursty Ferret is a proper ale.”) English people get a kick out of things being “proper.” “Proper!” can even stand as a full-fledged compliment.
Proper
can also be used subversively, as an intensifier to a derogatory statement (“Proper rude, isn’t she!”) or, even
more informally, as a synonym for
correctly
(“He never learned to drive proper.”)

This definition, while not entirely unknown, is not the primary one in America. If an American hears “a proper cup of tea,” he is apt to picture a pinkie-lifting exercise in etiquette—not the strong and hot brew this phrase calls to the English mind. All the most common American uses of the word
proper
are about conforming to convention, being respectable and appropriate, formal and sedate. When Americans call something
proper
they are thinking refined, virtuous, boring. Being proper means likely having to pretend to be something one isn’t. Being genuine, or “real,” is far more desirable in American society than being proper. What Americans might not realize is that when the English say
proper
, genuine and real is precisely what they mean.

For an example of what
proper
means to the English, look no further than the first meal of the day. A proper breakfast is the full English, otherwise known as the fry-up or the Full Monty. It dates to the Victorian era and, though they may not eat it every day, everyone agrees on what it is: sausage, bacon, fried eggs, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, baked beans, and fried bread. It is usually served with ketchup and HP sauce (a sweet and vinegary “brown sauce,” so named because its inventor heard that it was being served in a restaurant at the Houses of Parliament). Now that’s proper.

The English Breakfast Society (“Support the Tradition, Share the Love” #FryUp) claims that in the 1950s, half the nation started their day on the full English, and while it especially appealed to those who worked in industrial jobs, the meal is essentially classless—something rare in England, as you may have
gathered. There are many regional variations on the porky aspect of the breakfast. In the North there will be black pudding (a sausage made with pigs’ blood, pork, and a filler like bread crumbs or rusk), and in Devon and Cornwall, white pudding (similar to black pudding, but without the blood). Each region of England is known for a particular type of sausage. The Cumberland is spiced with pepper; the Gloucester contains Gloucester Old Spot pork and sage; the Yorkshire includes cayenne, nutmeg, white pepper, and mace; and the Lincolnshire sage and thyme. I could go on, but the point is that there is a consensus on what is “proper” when it comes to breakfast in England—even if the full English is widely regarded as hangover food today.

It’s not the Industrial Revolution anymore, after all, and few people want to go sit at a desk after eating approximately 1,550 calories—78 percent of an adult woman’s requirement for the day, as Jamie Oliver’s website helpfully informs us. If you want a lighter version, a health-drink company called Fuel, founded by a former tank commander in the British Army and an extreme-sports enthusiast, offers a liquid fry-up combining the flavors of bacon, sausage, poached egg, fried tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms, toast, salt and pepper, and brown sauce. It’s only 230 calories, and it packs twenty grams of protein (assuming you can keep it down). Apparently scientists had to test five hundred flavor combinations before they hit on this winner—pity the tasters of the 499 rejected shakes. If that doesn’t hit the spot, other foods the English eat for breakfast—that don’t fall under the heading of the full English but are nevertheless considered “proper”—include kippers (smoked herring), kedgeree (a dish of smoked haddock and hard-boiled eggs with rice, cream, and curry powder, topped with parsley), and kidneys on
toast. I never noticed before that these breakfasts are all brought to you by the letter
K
. Luckily, it is no longer true, as W. Somerset Maugham once said, that to eat well in England one must have breakfast three times a day.

There is no consensus in America about what breakfast should be, unless you count the “complete breakfast!” that sugary cereals are said to be “part of” in TV commercials: cereal (Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs), orange juice, toast, eggs, bacon, and fruit, which looks more like a hotel buffet than the average American kitchen table on a weekday morning. America’s regional variations are a bit more diverse than England’s. A typical Southern breakfast will include grits (ground hominy—dried corn kernels treated with lye). In Pennsylvania they like their scrapple (a loaf made of pork scraps and cornmeal, sliced and fried). In New York, lox and bagels with cream cheese are ubiquitous. In the Southwest, huevos rancheros (eggs with salsa, bell peppers, refried beans, and tortillas) are just the thing for the morning after the night before. Most cities in America, if they don’t have a famous local doughnut shop, will at least have Dunkin’ Donuts or, even better, Krispy Kreme. Both chains have established a beachhead in England, where there is no native doughnut brand, though jam-filled doughnuts (of the type that originated in Germany) are widely available. Americans share the English love of pork products, and artisanal sausage-making has become a feature of farmers’ markets and gourmet groceries, but in most of America if someone asks you your favorite sausage, they are really asking, “links or patties?,” referring to the shape of sausage you prefer—small and cylindrical, or burger-shaped.

Still, the classic American breakfast—when regional
differences are accounted for—is the diner breakfast. The kind where you order three scrambled eggs and get six. The kind that comes with a “side” of pancakes, as if the eggs and bacon and hash browns weren’t going to cut it. Because Americans love a sugary breakfast, and no restaurant seems to get this quite like the American chain diner Denny’s. One of their latest menu items is the Peanut Butter Cup Pancake Breakfast, which starts with two chocolate and white chocolate chip buttermilk pancakes, topped with hot fudge and drizzled with “peanut butter sauce.” They come with two eggs, hash browns or grits, bacon or sausage, and warm syrup. If this doesn’t prove Americans have no sense of propriety when it comes to breakfast, I don’t know what does. Perhaps this review of Denny’s Apple Pie French Toast, by a blogger named Erin Jackson from San Diego: “The Apple Pie French Toast struck me as a pretty fantastic idea . . . On top of a thick-cut slice of French toast, there’s a large spoonful of apple crisp (baked apple slices topped with a brown sugar and butter-heavy crumble), a drizzle of caramel sauce, and some powdered sugar. You get syrup on the side, but . . . if you’re going to add anything, make it the last few bites of ice cream from your deep-fried pancake ball sundae.”

Americans, perhaps alone among England’s international tourists, do not find the full English breakfast a daunting amount of food. Even though, like the English—truth be told—on a typical day at home they either skip breakfast or pick up a muffin or egg sandwich to eat
al desko
. Something everyone can agree is a “proper” breakfast in neither sense of the
word.

In which American earnestness and moral relativism are shown to be two sides of the same coin.

T
he Miss USA pageant has been one of America’s apple-pie events for more than sixty years. True, the television ratings aren’t what they used to be, but with Donald Trump taking over, you can bet that even if the hair doesn’t improve, the numbers will. In 2013, five million jaws dropped when Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, flamed out in the Q&A. The question was about women earning less than men. What did this say about American society?

“I think we can relate this back to education, and how we are continuing to try to strive to . . .” She hesitated. “. . . figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem and I think especially the men are, uh, seen as the leaders of this, so
we need to try to figure out how to create education better so that we can solve this problem.”

Wags were quick to point out that her home state has the lowest per-pupil spending on education in the nation—quite a distinction. In the aftermath, having lost the pageant to Miss Connecticut, Powell claimed to be grateful for the learning experience: “For myself, just being able to realize that it’s OK to be human, it’s OK to make mistakes,” she said. “Get back up and keep pushing forward and I think that’s a lesson I can share with a lot of people which I’m really grateful for.” Her response is so American that I would almost argue she deserves the crown.

There was a lot of predictable snark on the next day’s talk shows, blogs, and drive-time radio. This quickly gave way to hand-wringing over whether it was “OK” to laugh at Miss Utah’s expense, which is even more American. The English would never ask a question like that, because they aren’t as earnest as Americans. Americans are
really
earnest—in a way that the English find faintly ridiculous. So while Americans laugh at Miss Utah, they will feel somewhat guilty and wonder if it’s OK to do so. They will come to the conclusion that it is OK, as long as it’s all in fun, just as Miss Utah will decide that her humiliating gaffe was OK, as long as she (and others!) learned from it.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Americans have a monopoly on
OK
, but of course they don’t.
OK
is used worldwide and has analogues in many languages. Many nations have claimed credit for inventing it, and some of their stories are compelling, but I’m sorry to report that the truth is rather prosaic. In his book
OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word
, Allan Metcalf lays out a convincing case that
OK
first
appeared as a lame joke in the
Boston Morning Post
in March 1839. It was a deliberately incorrect abbreviation for “all correct.” This used to be common knowledge; over time,
OK
shed its origin story, along with its American accent. It belongs to Globish—not English—now. But, Metcalf argues,
OK
means something more to Americans than it does to the rest of the world. It amounts to a two-letter philosophy of life, expressing Americans’ “pragmatism, efficiency, and concern to get things done by hook or by crook.”

To this, I would add Americans’ essential sincerity. An American and an Englishman might arrive at the same decision, but they do so in a different spirit. The English “muck in”; Americans “help out.” The English are resigned; Americans are accepting. The English “mustn’t grumble” but Americans “turn lemons into lemonade.” Americans are known for “taking it easy.” They just say “OK.” It is a common American conversational tic to append “OK?” to the end of a sentence. “I’m just going to park here for a minute, OK?” “I’m going to open another bottle of wine, OK?” “I’m just going to send my kids over to your house while I run to the store, OK?” The saying “I’m OK, you’re OK” originated as a self-help book title in America and it remains in the culture decades later because it captures something essential about how Americans think and act.

Americans can be moral relativists, but they also want to be liked. They want to do what they want to do, but they feel obligated to justify it to everyone else. Whatever they want, if they want it bad enough, must by definition be “OK.” They apply the same logic to everyone else. The Baby Boomers pioneered “if it feels good, do it,” but they could accomplish only so much before the Internet. The current generation—of which Miss Utah is
one—are raising self-justification to a high art. In their song “It’s OK in the USA,” the band Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse sing, “It’s OK to be fat. It’s OK to be loud / OK to be dumb. It’s OK to be proud / And if you think your cat’s a gourmet, it’s OK.” That about covers it.

Americans are believers—not just in a religious sense but in the sense of going wholeheartedly down the path they have chosen. This is not always the right path. A high tolerance for mavericks and overconfidence goes with the territory. True genius erupts from this ethos—Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett—but so do crazy loners with guns and the courage to carry out their plans. No place does home-turf nutjobs like America. American earnestness comes at a price.

The English, by contrast, are natural skeptics, but they, too, have a high tolerance for difference and tend to like people who are what they call “bloody-minded.” Those who are “bloody-minded” are perverse, contrary, or stubborn, but the original and literal meaning was “bloodthirsty and inclined to violence.” No wonder the two countries remain political allies. Former prime minister Tony Blair was loved—and hated—in equal measure by the English for his American-style charisma and overconfidence. He lent President Bush a bust of Winston Churchill shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, as if to assure Bush that they were in it together, for better or worse. Churchill—with his just war and his “never, never, never give up”—was a high compliment to an American president contemplating a war of his own. Churchill also said that one could “always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else,” but it’s probably safe to say that wasn’t the quote on Blair’s mind at the time.

The two nations went wholeheartedly down their path to war, and we all know how that turned out. In a television interview shortly after his presidency ended, Bush admitted that the flawed case for war in Iraq was his “biggest regret,” saying, “That’s a do-over that I can’t do.” But in the end, “The thing that’s important for me is to get home and look in that mirror and say, ‘I did not compromise my principles.’”

Unlike Miss Utah, he appears to have learned nothing. But at least he’s OK with
it.