That's Not English (4 page)

In which we are surprised to discover that the English eat more chocolate than Americans do.

O
f all the words Americans have borrowed from the English, words with little cultural congruence, words that make them sound pretentious, or silly, or both (see
Cheers
), it is surprising the words that have been missed. Words that chime with the American character and would seem right at home. Words that would not make an American sound as if he or she had just returned from a junior year abroad. One such word is
moreish
, an adjective describing the quality of certain foods that makes one want to keep eating them. But you wouldn’t say, “That
sous vide
pigeon with morel reduction is really moreish,” even if you thought so. Because this word is really more about movie popcorn, salted peanuts, chocolate-covered raisins, malted milk balls . . . No
word implies the hand in the snack packet quite like
moreish
. So why don’t Americans have this word? No one outsnacks an American. Or so I thought, before moving to England.

The English are great snafflers. To snaffle is to eat something quickly, and sometimes without permission. Snaffling is what you do with the last brownie in the breakroom, or the chocolate-covered biscuits that you bought “for the children.” Snaffling is to the kitchen cabinet what foraging is to the wilderness.

If the English snaffle, Americans prefer to mainline their snacks, typically on the run. Unlike the English, Americans do not have much allegiance to set mealtimes. Restaurants serve nonstop. Carryout and to-go containers are masterpieces of engineering. Think mini Oreos that you can pour into your piehole from a twelve-ounce cup. Think “big grab” bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. Or a “go sack” of Smartfood. (Translation for non-Americans: This is a magically delicious cheese-flavored popcorn.) Think chips made in the shape of little shovels, so as to hold a maximum quantity of dip. The equivalent large packages in England will say, in a large, admonishing font, “great for sharing!” or “love-to-share pack.” American snacks may be labeled “family-size” but, conveniently, the size of the family is not specified.

Ironically, it was American snack companies that also pioneered the practice of charging more for far
less
food, in the form of “100-calorie packs” containing five Cheez-Its or half a dozen creamless Oreo wafers, and if there’s anything more depressing in Snackdom, I don’t want to know. In America there is no middle way. You’re strapping on the feedbag, surrendering to
your animal urges, or paying the Nabisco police to help you combat them. Americans like their snacks to come with health claims: low-fat, gluten-free, no trans fats, calcium-enriched, multigrain. They like it so much that one of the most effective diet tips ever marketed in the United States was Michael Pollan’s “avoid food products that make health claims.”

The English aren’t as into health claims as they are the concept of luxury—a word not generally associated with foodstuffs in America. Anything from a bag of granola to a box of chocolates can be labeled as
luxury
, almost as if to reassure a wary public. If it says
luxury
, it must be posh nosh. When you consider that, in living memory, potato chips, or
crisps
, came with a little packet of salt that you had to add yourself, maybe it is not so surprising. The flavoring technology simply didn’t exist. This is why bags of crisps are often labeled “ready salted” in England, even now. It’s as if the manufacturers are saying, “Don’t take these presalted crisps for granted, people.”

Perhaps such privation is what paved the way for the absolute riot of taste combinations that awaits English crisp snafflers today: hog roast, beef and Yorkshire pudding, pickled onion, prawn cocktail, sweet chili, smoky bacon, lamb curry, Worcestershire sauce, and sausage and ketchup flavo(u)rs, just for a start. Americans—who normally view variety as a birthright—nevertheless find this a bit nauseating. They do love their barbecue and sour cream and onion—heck, even a little salt and vinegar from time to time, to mix things up. But beef and lamb flavor? No, thanks. Ask many expat Americans what snack they miss most and they will say Pirate’s Booty, little puffs made from cornmeal and rice, flavored with “aged white cheddar,” and
“baked perfectly to pirate standards.” Clearly the English do not know what they are missing and have few pirate standards to speak of.

So you can see that while America and England are both snack-centric cultures, they do not always agree on what is moreish. For example, Americans might be surprised by the variation in social norms about when and how much peanut butter is appropriate to eat. Many Americans consider peanut butter a perfectly reasonable breakfast food, and why not? It probably has as much protein as eggs, and it goes better with syrup. The English don’t necessarily object to peanut butter, but they ingest it in far smaller quantities. The largest jar of peanut butter you could find in an English supermarket would fit cozily inside a child’s shoe. The largest one you would find in America is a gallon-size bucket with a handle, the better to swing it into the back of your minivan. The English generally do not touch peanut butter before noon, but many of them like their toast with Marmite—a sticky brown paste made of yeast extract. Which is grosser? I think we can answer that objectively.

No one believes me when I say it, but the English have a much sweeter sweet tooth than Americans. The cookie, or biscuit, offerings in an English supermarket are as varied as they are in America, but more of them are marketed to adults. Sweets (or sweeties)—nonchocolate candies—are a lifelong indulgence and, for some, an obsession. Strong flavors are more common than they are in America. (An exception to the rule is Altoids, “The Original Celebrated Curiously Strong Mints,” which originated in eighteenth-century England, and whose nostalgic tins are now made in Chattanooga, Tennessee.) English lemon-and-pear drops (described by Roald Dahl in his memoir,
Boy
, as “smelling of
nail varnish”) could burn the enamel off your teeth. Bendicks Bittermints are Peppermint Patties to a power of ten—in a distinctive dark green–and-gold box that proudly proclaims Bendicks’ Royal Warrant, “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.” Liquorice Allsorts look like little pastel plastic Lego bricks but taste, to the American palate, like purest evil. Aniseed balls are dusky purple and, as advertised, taste like aniseed—another candy it is hard to imagine children going for, but English children do. In America, by contrast, Sour Patch Kids (sweet gummies coated with sour sugar) and Pop Rocks (tiny candies that are carbonated, creating tiny explosions in the mouth) are considered daring, and M&M’s are the bestselling candy.

This is not to say that the English don’t love chocolate, too. They put away about ten kilos per person, per year—roughly twice as much as the average American—and their bestselling bar is Cadbury Dairy Milk. But on the subject of American chocolate, they are united in disgust. The masters of understatement have proclaimed Hershey’s to taste of “cat vomit,” “poo,” and “sour milk.” It is widely known to English expats that even Cadbury-branded chocolate is not safe in America because, as one bitter chocolate-lover put it, “Cadbury made the mistake of letting the disgusting Hershey company of weasels fool around with the recipes . . . in America as part of a marketing and distributing scheme.” It is true that the manufacturing methods are different. A Cadbury Dairy Milk bar contains 23 percent cocoa solids, whereas a Hershey bar contains just 11 percent. The first ingredient in the Dairy Milk is milk; in a Hershey bar, it’s sugar. And, as Julia Moskin reported in
The
New York Times
, although Hershey’s process is a closely guarded secret, “experts
speculate that Hershey’s puts its milk through controlled lipolysis,” causing the fatty acids in the milk to break down. This produces “butyric acid, also found in Parmesan cheese and the spit-up of babies . . . a distinctive tang that Americans . . . now expect in chocolate.” To each his own.

For most people, the preference for one brand or snack over another comes down to childhood tastes and the memories associated with them. The English may never become converts to Hershey’s chocolate, and Americans may never embrace Marmite. But Americans might want to make a habit of
moreish
. I promise not to make fun of anyone borrowing this Britishism—as long as you save some M&M’s for me.

In which we find out why the English love uniforms so much.

M
ama, that girl has a red cardigan! And that one, and that one . . .” I explain why most of the children in our neighborhood always seem to be wearing the same outfit: It is their school uniform. My three-year-old looks quizzical. “But what’s ‘uniform’?” As we keep walking toward Edgware Road—past the children in their red jackets and cardigans; past the policemen in their helmets and the street cleaners in yellow reflective vests; past the grocery store where the workers all wear green smocks; past the
shisha
cafés where women in hijab sit drinking tea—I realize that almost everyone is wearing a uniform. Around here, you need a word to describe the state of
not
being in uniform. And the English have one:
mufti
.

Mufti
has been the slang term for plain clothes in the British Army for more than two hundred years. Army officers, in their downtime, often wore dressing gowns, smoking caps, and slippers that resembled the traditional dress of a Muslim cleric. A mufti is an expert in Islamic law who is entitled to rule on religious matters, for example issuing a fatwa. This is an odd juxtaposition, to say the least, but
mufti
is just one of many words the English borrowed from India. A comprehensive list can be found in Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell’s
Hobson-Jobson
:
Being a Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive
(1886). Other
Hobson-Jobson
words include
khaki
,
pyjamas
,
veranda
,
loot
,
pukka
(genuine),
shampoo
,
doolally
(crazy), and
jungle
.

Many
Hobson-Jobson
words are used by Americans, too, often without any idea of their history.
Hobson-Jobson
’s authors spent fourteen years compiling their book, and, as Kate Teltscher notes in her introduction to the latest edition, they were in close correspondence with James Murray, the editor of the ten-volume
New English Dictionary
(later to be renamed the
Oxford English Dictionary
). Many of Yule and Burnell’s definitions went straight into Murray’s masterwork, with the result that there are around five hundred citations of
Hobson-Jobson
in today’s
OED
. So transformed has English been by these loaned words from India that it is possible to make a game of it, as two characters (Flora Crewe, an English poet, and Nirad Das, an Indian artist) do in Tom Stoppard’s play
Indian Ink
.

FLORA:
While having tiffin on the veranda of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pajamas looking like a coolie.

DAS:
I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug escaped from the choky and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.

FLORA:
I went doolally at the durbar and was sent back to Blighty in a dooley feeling rather dikki with a cup of char and a chit for a chotapeg.

DAS:
Yes, and the burra sahib who looked so pukka in his topee sent a coolie to the memsahib—

FLORA:
No, no. You can’t have memsahib
and
sahib, that’s cheating—and anyway I’ve already said coolie.

DAS:
I concede, Miss Crewe. You are the Hobson-Jobson champion.

This exchange sounds so much like a quiz show on NPR or BBC Radio 4 that you’d almost expect Peter Sagal or Sandi Toksvig to interrupt them with a scripted joke and points to the winner.

One who is in mufti is assumed to be at ease, but I have observed that English people often seem more at ease in their uniforms. This could be because absolutely no one does uniforms quite like the English, and it starts from early childhood. More than 90 percent of English children wear uniforms to school from age four, and there is broad agreement, crossing political party lines as well as class lines, that uniforms are a good idea. Reasons the English cite for their approval of uniforms include improving discipline and focus, and leveling class distinctions.

Fewer than a quarter of American schools have uniform policies. Those that do are mostly private, or concentrated in larger
cities. But uniform policies have been on the rise, subject to heated debate in the United States since the late ’90s, when President Clinton suggested that American schools adopt uniforms to improve students’ concentration and cut down on conflict and competition over dress. Not everyone agrees that the problems in American schools can be solved so easily. An American social scientist, David Brunsma, who has studied the subject extensively, concluded that instituting uniform policies did not have any significant impact on student attendance or achievement, but was more “analogous to cleaning and brightly painting a deteriorating building.”

Americans are less comfortable with the idea of uniforms than the English, and when objecting to them, they often invoke the ideal of defending individual rights to expression. If Americans are so into their individuality, the English might wonder, then why are they so often seen wearing similar jeans and T-shirts? Why does individuality so often translate to informality, even slovenliness? Why do American tourists, who must have heard how much it rains in England, never seem to carry proper raincoats but instead wear disposable plastic ponchos with flimsy hoods, resembling packs of used Kleenex wafting around London in their “fanny packs”? (The English find this locution hilarious because
fanny
is slang for
vagina
, which they astonishingly will also call a woman’s
front bottom
—though this at least sounds less confrontational than America’s
vajayjay
. Reference will also be made, even in medical settings, to the
back passage
, which makes the anus sound like the hallway of a gracious country house—at any rate, somewhere you would be welcome to enter only if you were quite friendly with the family. Incidentally, the English call fanny packs “bum bags,” but they
hardly ever wear them.) It would seem that Americans, having spent their childhoods in mufti, grow up to adopt a kind of uniform, at least when traveling. But growing up in uniform is certainly no guarantee of one’s future sartorial sense.

Too much uniform-wearing can have consequences. Those who are indifferent to clothes end up confused about how to dress themselves in mufti. I have a friend whose husband borrows her socks without compunction—they’re the right color, so what’s the difference? Some English women, perhaps in reaction to being made to wear pinafores—or worse, plus fours—well into their adolescence, throw modesty to the wind when they at last gain control of their closets. At the first sign of spring, acres of sunburned cleavage and fake-baked legs are revealed, prompting fashion police to decree: “Legs
or
tits out—not both!” Even covering up can be fraught with peril. Although the weather often warrants wearing black opaque tights year-round, they do look out of place in July. And one fashion blogger quipped, while watching the royal wedding, that England ought to have a Ministry of Silly Hats. The peach potty seat Princess Beatrice perched on her head was surely an attention-grabber, but even a cursory look at
HELLO!
magazine in summer would show it was not wholly unrepresentative of what you’d see at a society wedding or Ladies’ Day at Ascot. This kind of audacity is one of my favorite things about England. Where an American might play it safe and go for “appropriate,” the English are bold with their fashion.

Those who are not indifferent to clothes move on from their natty uniforms to become some of the most flamboyant and imaginative dressers around. There is a brand of confidence that comes from knowing the rules well enough to flout them.
English men, in particular, can be peacocks, fond of hats, uproariously patterned waistcoats (pronounced “weskits”), silk socks, and even the occasional ascot (“askit,” please, as if you had to ask it). The American analogue is the exception that proves the rule: the New England preppy. American men who grow up wearing prep school uniforms become the most likely to wear red trousers or needlepoint belts with whale motifs in adult life. Still, the preppy’s pink-and-green plumage has a youthful, carefree, and casual spirit about it, and it’s primarily an off-duty look.

In England, one can still buy shirts with detachable collars, a style that was invented in America by a housewife who wanted to cut down on her laundry but now is seen as foppish and retro in the extreme. Speaking of foppish and retro, I recently ran into a friend who was carrying a tall cardboard box. He told me he was on his way to drop off his top hat for refurbishment. This did not seem to be a euphemism for anything. It was, he informed me, the best of his top hats. He owns two more: a collapsible one that fits under his seat at the opera, and a “casual” one for outdoor events where he might be sprayed with champagne when someone’s horse, or boat, wins. He was frankly put out at the prospect of doing without it for any amount of time. One could not make this up. But believe me, if there is any place this would still be happening in 2015, it is England.

We arrive at Anne’s nursery, where most of the mothers are wearing near-identical skinny jeans, neutral cashmere sweaters, ballet flats, and long scarves, wrapped twice. When mufti itself becomes a uniform, we are right back where we started.