That's Not English (12 page)

In which the existence of the English “stiff upper lip” is called into question.

M
ustn’t grumble” is a phrase as much associated with the English as “keep calm and carry on” or “keep a stiff upper lip.” Like the Black Knight in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
, who insists, upon having both arms cut off by King Arthur, that “’tis merely a scratch!” the English have a reputation for stoicism. So you might not expect that a word meaning “peevish complaint” has been in consistent use among them since the 1500s. That word is
whinge
—and actually, the English themselves would be the first to tell you that the stiff upper lip is not much in evidence anymore. The English grumble
all the time
. They make rather a point of it. Matthew Engel, writing for the
Financial Times Magazine
, identified “the Grumble” as a great British
institution, noting that the phrase “contains that other very English quality, irony. It can be a disguised grumble. In fact, the English are very practiced and skilful grumblers . . . What they are bad at is complaining . . . They habitually refuse to tackle an issue head-on.” (Interestingly, a common response to “How are you?” in England is “Can’t complain.”)

Whinging
as a word carries with it a whiff of futility. Whinging is a passive occupation, whereas someone who complains might actually expect—and get—results. If you ever accidentally cut someone in a line in England (known as “jumping the queue”), what you’ll hear will be grumbling, whinging, under-the-breath comments, and sighs: the barely audible sounds of half a dozen people deciding, all at once, not to confront you. Whereas an American might just say, “Hey, buddy—the end of the line is over there.”

Americans, too, are great at whining—but when they want something to change, they complain. The English feel more comfortable with whinging than complaining because whinging is not considered too confrontational or high-maintenance. Whinging requires nothing more of the person listening than a nod, a shrug, or some other mild form of agreement. This can frustrate attempts to help them. On the BBC’s consumer affairs call-in program,
You and Yours
, hosts Winifred Robinson and Peter White spend a substantial portion of each show trying to figure out—often cutting people off midwhinge—what their callers actually want them to
do
. For callers to a consumer affairs radio show, they are surprisingly unfocused on solving their problems and seem content with merely being heard. Still, England needs a show like
You and Yours
, as it focuses attention on the more egregious lapses in service by English companies.

Customer service is not what it might be in England—an
obvious and boring observation on a par with saying that there is a lot of water in the Atlantic. In an article for
The New Yorker
, “Take It or Leave It,” the English author Zadie Smith, who lives in New York, compares the American word
takeout
(which she defines as food that a restaurant “intends to take out and deliver to someone,” though many Americans would be more likely use the word
delivery
) with England’s word,
takeaway
, which implies the eater should “come and take away your own bloody food, thank you very much.” Smith prefers the American model, but takes issue with Americans’ most common complaint about England: “I’m not going to complain about Britain’s ‘lack of a service culture’ . . . I don’t think any nation should elevate service to the status of culture. At best, it’s a practicality, to be enacted politely and decently by both parties, but no one should be asked to pretend that the intimate satisfaction of her existence is servicing you, the ‘guest,’ with a shrimp sandwich wrapped in plastic.” But “intimate satisfaction” seems to me to be a vast overstatement of Americans’ expectations when it comes to service. Politeness and decency is really what it’s about—and being made to feel appreciated as a customer. Being treated well as a customer, one feels inspired—or at the very least obligated—to respond in kind, and ideally, respect and appreciation are mutually reinforced. Is that too much to ask?

Service people in England tend to regard customers with suspicion. In most English shops, the assumption that “the customer is always right” is nonexistent, even laughable. This raises any store with great service to the level of consumer nirvana. These few, exceptional stores are celebrated, never taken for granted as they might be in America. One example is the chain department store John Lewis. An American who shall
remain nameless bought the wrong size sheets (easy to do, as standard US and UK bed sizes differ by several inches), discovering the mistake only after discarding all the packaging and attempting to make the bed. He put the already-washed sheets back into the John Lewis bag and returned to the store, and the staff actually exchanged them—even sympathized with him. (You have to wonder if the sales assistants in the bed and bath department would have had such a kindly reaction to a woman who’d made the same silly mistake. Which is why I sent my husband to return the sheets.) Sometimes simply being American can work in a consumer’s favor in England. If you are willing to confront an issue politely but directly, people will be so nonplussed that they’ll often give you what you’ve asked for. Whereas whinging would be met with a shrug: “What you want me to do about it, mate?” One could argue that frustrating encounters like that positively require a stiff upper lip, but instead many English businesses and government offices need to display prominent signs saying things like,
WARNING
:
WE
WILL
NOT
TOLERATE
PHYSIC
AL
OR
VERBAL
ABUSE
T
OWARDS
OUR
STAFF
.
All right, then.

Given how good Americans are at complaining, and the emotional tenor of American life in general, I was amazed to find out that the phrase “stiff upper lip”—so strongly associated by Americans with the English—actually originated in the United States. Historian Thomas Dixon, in his “History of Emotions” blog, relates that the phrase was unknown to British readers as late as the 1870s: “It is a pleasing irony that it was introduced to them in a magazine founded by Charles Dickens, the great master of Victorian pathos and sentimentality. Dickens died in 1870. The following year, his journal
All the Year
Round
carried an article on ‘Popular American Phrases’ in which to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’ was explained as meaning ‘to remain firm to a purpose, to keep up one’s courage.’ Even by the end of the nineteenth century the phrase still appeared in quotation marks, and was sometimes explained as an Americanism.” The phrase came about at a time when life in America was “hard cheese,” as my friend Peter likes to say. The first recorded use of the term was in 1815, when the nation was not quite forty years old, and it continued at least through the time of the Civil War, after which it was discovered by the English. As life became easier in America, this phrase and the implied stoic orientation to life slowly disappeared, in favor of a more emotionally open and honest style that is taken to extremes today.

The English were not always known for their stiff upper lips, any more than Americans are now. In the Victorian era and even before, public weeping by men and women alike was considered normal, and outpourings of public grief sometimes accompanied the deaths of public figures. As the editor of
Private Eye
, Ian Hislop, has observed, “In the 18th Century the word ‘sentimental’ was not pejorative in [England]. It was a term of praise for a person of taste and refinement who displayed their emotions openly. The nation which would become known for its ability to ‘keep calm and carry on’ had yet to appear.”

This began to change near the end of the nineteenth century. Dixon cites Darwin’s pioneering study,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872), which “popularized a racial hierarchy of emotional expression, with restrained Englishmen at the top and primitive ‘savages’ at the bottom. Darwin asserted that ‘savages weep copiously from very slight causes,’ whereas ‘Englishmen rarely cry, except under the
pressure of the acutest grief.’” The stiff upper lip reached its apotheosis with the wars of the twentieth century. As my father-in-law, who was born at the end of World War II, is wont to say in a crisis: “Worse things happen at sea,” and he is mostly right. But this attitude is not common today, and some who were raised with it have abandoned it as the trait of their parents’ generation. A study (somewhat oddly commissioned by Warburtons Family Bakers) found that seven out of ten people in England greet their friends with a double cheek kiss, six out of ten have wept in public, and eight out of ten cry in front of family and friends. Many have observed that the floodgates seemed to have been opened on or about August 31, 1997, as drifts of flowers were flung in front of Kensington Palace and much of the nation went into a very public period of mourning for Princess Diana. To be sure, not everyone abandoned their stiff upper lips during this time, but those who came out against the outpouring of grief, or admitted to finding it repellent, were all but censored.

Wistfulness for the stiff upper lip runs deep in England, as evidenced by the runaway success of the adage “Keep Calm and Carry On.” This poster, with its cheery red background and crown logo, is assumed by many to have been a morale-booster during World War II. In fact, the British government’s Ministry of Information had designed it specifically for use in the event of a Nazi occupation, and when the war ended, thousands of copies were pulped. One of the few still in existence surfaced in 2000, in a bookstore in the north of England called Barter Books. The owners, Stuart and Mary Manley, decided to sell reproductions. As Mary told
The New York Times
, it evokes a “nostalgia for a certain British character, an outlook.” How the image is being used today reflects the massive cultural shifts since World
War II. The image has been thoroughly commodified—on products like mugs, tea towels, posters, pins, and tote bags—increasing in popularity even as the English populace appears less and less likely to heed its message. The situation is ripe for parody, and one alternative design, reading “Now Panic and Freak Out,” seems more apropos.

Americans are equally besotted with the “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme (or, as one parody has it, “Meme meme and memey meme”). They persist in seeing the English in this old-fashioned way, possibly because the English are still quite aloof compared to them, and Americans understandably read this as stoicism. These days, while the English, for example, rarely speak to strangers on trains, feel slightly uncomfortable when someone holds more than one door in a row open for them, and generally give outsiders a wide berth, within their own social circles they can be just as dramatic, sentimental, and maudlin as anyone else. It’s kind of refreshing—at least, you won’t hear me whinging about
it.

In which we swear—and share—alike.

W
hen Martin Scorsese’s
The Wolf of Wall Street
was released in 2014, it had the questionable distinction of containing more F-bombs than any other drama—2.83 per minute, a total of 506. Only a documentary about the word itself, appropriately titled
Fuck
, exceeds it in cinematic history, with 857 instances. But this is far from unusual for American films, in which profane words frequently number in the hundreds. Television tends to have stricter standards. Back in 1972, the comedian George Carlin released an album including a monologue called “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” These days, you can hear all of them on cable, but they remain taboo for network television shows. This has inspired creativity. As Dan Harmon, the creator of
Community
, told
The New York Times
, “As a writer, you’re
always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk. [
Douche
] is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years—a thing that sounds like a thing you can’t say.”

The influence of American films and television on English culture is strong. Any English person who hasn’t visited America could be forgiven for assuming that America is one giant cluster-cuss, its citizens dropping F-bombs like Eliza Doolittle dropped her
H
s. But this isn’t necessarily so. There is a real puritanical streak in America that is much discussed—but little understood—by the English. It manifests itself in unpredictable ways, like an unwillingness to use seemingly innocuous words (see
Toilet
) and a certain gentility when it comes to swearing. For example, Americans consider it a big deal when a public figure is caught cussing. After President Obama declared his intention to “find out whose ass to kick” in connection with the BP oil spill,
Time
magazine published a “Brief History of Political Profanity,” saying that although “the comment wasn’t particularly vulgar . . . coarse language always seems shocking when it comes from the mouth of a President.” Americans—even presidents—use all kinds of language, but in real life swearing retains more of its shock value than you would imagine, if your primary contact with American culture were its movies.

It is not unusual, in the real America, to meet a graduate of the Ned Flanders School of Swearing. “Gosh darn it!” “What the dickens?” “What the flood?” “Leapin’ Lazarus!” Julie Gray, in her blog, “Just Effing,” describes the phenomenon: “I recently said to someone that I’d be shocked as pink paint if something didn’t happen. My mother used to describe either a person or a situation that was going downhill as ‘going to hell in a hand
basket.’ My grandmother used to say ‘good NIGHT’ when something surprised or shocked her . . . I don’t know where I picked it up but I will sometimes say ‘H-E double toothpicks’ or ‘fudge.’” Even Nicholson Baker, in his book
House of Holes
(promisingly subtitled “A Book of Raunch”), has his characters say things like “for gosh sakes,” “golly,” and “damnation” as well as “fuck,” just to keep it real.

Celia Walden, an English woman who moved to LA, described for the
Telegraph
her realization that Americans “don’t use expletives as much as we do.” She found it refreshing (“I haven’t been cursed at in nearly a year”) and noted that her “new sensitivity” to swearing might be related to having become a mother to a child whom she’d rather “didn’t end up like the tiny mite I once saw fall out of his pushchair in Shepherd’s Bush, look accusingly up at his mother, and calmly enunciate the words: ‘Bloody hell.’ I still wonder whether those were that poor child’s first words.”

No matter what age they start, the English seem far more fluent at swearing than Americans. They are more likely to link colorful language with having a sense of humor than with coarseness or vulgarity. Some even have the ability to make a word sound like a swear when it isn’t. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie once performed a comedy sketch based on the idea that if the BBC wouldn’t let them swear on the air, they’d simply make up their own curse words, “which are absolutely pitiless in their detail . . . and no one can stop us from using them. Here they are:

STEPHEN:
Prunk.

HUGH:
Shote.

STEPHEN:
Cucking.

HUGH:
Skank.

STEPHEN:
Fusk.

HUGH:
Pempslider.

STEPHEN:
No, we said we wouldn’t use that one.

HUGH:
Did we?

STEPHEN:
Yes, that’s going too far.

HUGH:
What, “pempslider”?

STEPHEN:
Shut up.

Even without making up new words, the English definitely have, and make use of, a larger vocabulary of swears than Americans. Americans mostly find it funny—as if the English were swearing in another language—but Ruth Margolis, writing for BBC America’s blog “Mind the Gap: A Brit’s Guide to Surviving America,” warned them that Americans might find their language offensive: “To get on in polite company, try to avoid . . . friendly-offensive banter. Brits exchange jovial insults because we’re too uptight and emotionally stunted to say how we really feel. The stronger your friendship, the more you can lay into each other and still come away with a warm feeling. This is not how Americans roll. Tell your U.S. pal he’s a moron, a twat or a daft f***, and you likely won’t get invited to his wedding.”

Indeed, there are some words the English use casually that are considered more offensive or insulting by Americans. As Margolis notes, for example, in England one might plausibly
tease a friend of either sex by calling them a
twat
(rhymes with
cat
) or the four-letter
c
-word, which is all but unsayable in the United Sates—and which linguist John McWhorter (while not at all against swearing in principle) has lumped in with the
n
-word as one of Americans’ most taboo. Americans find it really shocking to hear it used carelessly.

There are also words the English use that are actually “swearier”—even less polite—than they sound to the American ear, simply because they are unfamiliar. Hugh Grant gets a huge laugh saying, “Bugger! Bugger!” to express frustration in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, but, as Philip Thody describes in
Don’t Do It! A Dictionary of the Forbidden
,
bugger
is a term of bigotry and abuse with a long and nasty history: “Rarely used in a literal sense in modern English, and scarcely used at all in the USA, where the term is sodomy . . . It comes, through the Old French ‘bougre,’ from the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to the Greek Orthodox Church, whose members were said to be Bulgarians, infected by the Albigensian heresy, and thus tending to practise unnatural vices. Since the Cathars made a special virtue of chastity, it was a shade unfair. However, since in the Middle Ages sodomy and buggery were linked to heresy as well as to witchcraft, it was perhaps only to be expected.”
Bugger
is also versatile: “Bugger off” means “go away.” “I’ll be buggered” is a general expression of surprise. “Bugger me!” is as well, but it implies a greater degree of astonishment. Similarly, the word
sod
—used to describe a foolish person, or to tell someone to “sod off” (get lost)—is actually short for
sodomite
.

Bloody
is an all-purpose intensifier that, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, once qualified as the strongest expletive available in just about every English-speaking nation
except the United States. In 1914 its use in George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion
was hugely controversial. (Later, when a reporter from the
Daily Express
interviewed an actual Cockney flower girl, she said that Shaw’s dialogue was unrealistic: Neither she nor her fellow flower-floggers would ever have used such a filthy word.) When Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera
Ruddigore—
originally spelled
Ruddygore
—opened in January 1887, the title caused considerable offense. Ian Bradley relates in
The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan
that W. S. Gilbert, when approached by a member of his London club who commented that he saw no difference between “Ruddygore” and “Bloodygore,” shot back, “Then I suppose you’ll take it that if I say ‘I admire your ruddy countenance,’ I mean ‘I like your bloody cheek.’” It’s hard to take
bloody
seriously now, given how often the English use it. This is the risk with any good swear: Overuse it and it loses its meaning. Still, to Americans
bloody
remains the quintessential English swear, and one of the only ones they have not adopted themselves (except when they’re being pretentious or ironic).

Both countries share a fascination with swears that reference the male anatomy. Americans and the English have
dick
,
cock
, and
prick
in common, but England takes the theme further with
pillock
and
knob
, as well as
masturbator
synonyms
tosser
and
wanker
. A commenter named Brian D. on Ben Yagoda’s blog, “Not One-Off Britishisms,” told the story of a group of British engineers from his company, sent to work at Wang Labs in Massachusetts. They were asked to attend a meeting to recognize an employee for outstanding achievement: “It was announced from the stage that this person was a King in the company and so would be presented with the Wang King award. The entire British contingent had to leave the room in hysterics.”

Misunderstandings abound, but one thing is for sure. If you choose to swear, and you want your swearing to be understood on both sides of the Atlantic, you can’t go wrong with the classic, the universal, the little black dress of swears:
fuck
. As Audrey Hepburn once said, “Everything I learned, I learned from the
movies.”