- •Kate Fox
- •Watching the English
- •Watching the english
- •Contents
- •Introduction – Anthropology at Home
- •Introductionanthropology at home
- •The ‘grammar’ of englishness
- •Participant observation and its discontents
- •The Good, the Bad and the Uncomfortable
- •My Family and other Lab Rats
- •Trust me, I’m an anthropologist
- •Boring but important
- •The nature of culture
- •Rule making
- •Globalization and tribalization
- •Class and race
- •Britishness and englishness
- •Stereotypes and cultural genomics
- •Part one conversation codes the weather
- •The rules of english weather-speak The Reciprocity Rule
- •The Context Rule
- •The Agreement Rule
- •Exceptions to the Agreement Rule
- •The Weather Hierarchy Rule
- •Snow and the Moderation Rule
- •The Weather-as-family Rule
- •The Shipping Forecast Ritual
- •Weather-speak rules and englishness
- •Grooming-talk
- •Humour rules
- •The importance of not being earnest rule
- •The ‘Oh, Come Off It!’ Rule
- •Irony rules
- •The Understatement Rule
- •The Self-deprecation Rule
- •Humour and comedy
- •Humour and class
- •Humour rules and englishness
- •Linguistic class codes
- •The vowels vs consonants rule
- •Terminology rules – u and non-u revisited
- •The Seven Deadly Sins
- •Serviette
- •‘Smart’ and ‘Common’ Rules
- •Class-denial Rules
- •Linguistic class codes and englishness
- •Emerging talk-rules: the mobile phone
- •Pub-talk
- •The rules of english pub-talk The Sociability Rule
- •The Invisible-queue Rule
- •The Pantomime Rule
- •Pub-talk rules and englishness
- •Part two behaviour codes home rules
- •The moat-and-drawbridge rule
- •Nestbuilding rules
- •The Territorial-marking Rule
- •Class rules
- •Matching and Newness Rules
- •The Brag-wall Rule
- •The Satellite-dish Rule
- •The Eccentricity Clause
- •House-talk rules
- •The ‘Nightmare’ Rule
- •Money-talk Rules
- •Improvement-talk Rules
- •Class Variations in House-talk Rules
- •The Awful Estate-agent Rule
- •Garden rules
- •‘Your Own Front Garden, You May Not Enjoy’
- •The Front-garden Social-availability Rule (and ‘Sponge’ Methodology)
- •The Counter-culture Garden-sofa Exception
- •The Back-garden Formula
- •The nspcg Rule
- •Class Rules
- •Class Indicators and the Eccentricity Clause
- •The Ironic-gnome Rule
- •Home rules and englishness
- •Rules of the road
- •Public transport rules
- •The Denial Rule
- •Exceptions to the Denial Rule
- •The Politeness Exception
- •The Information Exception
- •The Moan Exception
- •The Mobile-phone Ostrich Exception
- •Courtesy rules
- •‘Negative-politeness’ Rules
- •Bumping Experiments and the Reflex-apology Rule
- •Rules of Ps and Qs
- •Taxi Exceptions to the Denial Rule – the Role of Mirrors
- •Queuing rules
- •The Indirectness Rule
- •The Paranoid Pantomime Rule
- •Body-language and Muttering Rules
- •The Unseen Choreographer Rule
- •The Fair-play Rule
- •The Drama of Queuing
- •A Very English Tribute
- •Car rules
- •The Status-indifference Rule
- •Class Rules The ‘Mondeo Test’
- •The ‘Mercedes-Test’
- •Car-care and Decoration Rules
- •The Mobile Castle Rule
- •The Ostrich Rule
- •Road-rage and the ‘Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be’ Rule
- •Courtesy Rules
- •Fair-play Rules
- •Road rules and englishness
- •Work to rule
- •The muddle rules
- •Humour rules
- •The Importance of Not Being Earnest Rule
- •Irony and Understatement Rules
- •The modesty rule – and the ‘bumpex’ school of advertising
- •The polite procrastination rule
- •The money-talk taboo
- •Variations and the Yorkshire Inversion
- •Class and the Vestigial Trade-prejudice Rule
- •The moderation rule
- •Safe, Sensible, Bourgeois Aspirations
- •Future Stability More Important Than Fun
- •Industrious, Diligent and Cautious with Money
- •The Dangers of Excessive Moderation
- •The fair-play rule
- •Moaning rules
- •The Monday-morning Moan
- •Dress codes and englishness
- •Food rules
- •The ambivalence rule
- •Anti-earnestness and obscenity rules
- •Tv-dinner rules
- •The novelty rule
- •Moaning and complaining rules
- •The Silent Complaint
- •The Apologetic Complaint
- •The Loud, Aggressive, Obnoxious Complaint
- •The ‘Typical!’ Rule Revisited
- •Culinary class codes
- •The Health-correctness Indicator
- •Timing and Linguistic Indicators Dinner/Tea/Supper Rules
- •Lunch/Dinner Rules
- •Breakfast Rules – and Tea Beliefs
- •Table Manners and ‘Material Culture’ Indicators Table Manners
- •‘Material Culture’ Indicators
- •The Knife-holding Rule
- •Forks and the Pea-eating Rules
- •The ‘Small/Slow Is Beautiful’ Principle
- •Napkin Rings and Other Horrors
- •Port-passing Rules
- •The meaning of chips
- •Chips, Patriotism and English Empiricism
- •Chip-sharing Rules and Sociability
- •Food rules and englishness
- •Rules of sex
Boring but important
This book is not written for other social scientists, but rather for that elusive creature publishers used to call ‘the intelligent layman’. My non-academic approach cannot, however, be used as a convenient excuse for woolly thinking, sloppy use of language, or failing to define my terms. This is a book about the ‘rules’ of Englishness, and I cannot simply assert that we all know what we mean by a ‘rule’, without attempting to explain the sense or senses in which I am using the term.
I am using a rather broad interpretation of the concept of a rule, based on four of the definitions allowed by the Oxford English Dictionary, namely:
a principle, regulation or maxim governing individual conduct;
a standard of discrimination or estimation; a criterion, a test, a measure;
an exemplary person or thing; a guiding example;
a fact, or the statement of a fact, which holds generally good; the normal or usual state of things.
Thus, my quest to identify the rules of Englishness is not confined to a search for specific rules of conduct, but will include rules in the wider sense of standards, norms, ideals, guiding principles and ‘facts’ about ‘normal or usual’ English behaviour.
This last is the sense of ‘rule’ we are using when we say: ‘As a rule, the English tend to be X (or prefer Y, or dislike Z).’ When we use the term rule in this way, we do not mean – and this is important – that all English people always or invariably exhibit the characteristic in question, only that it is a quality or behaviour pattern which is common enough, or marked enough, to be noticeable and significant. Indeed, it is a fundamental requirement of a social rule – by whatever definition – that it can be broken. Rules of conduct (or standards, or principles) of this kind are not like scientific or mathematical laws, statements of a necessary state of affairs; they are by definition contingent. If it were, for example, utterly inconceivable and impossible that anyone would ever jump a queue, there would be no need for a rule prohibiting queue jumping.3
When I speak of the unwritten rules of Englishness, therefore, I am clearly not suggesting that such rules are universally obeyed in English society, or that no exceptions or deviations will be found. That would be ludicrous. My claim is only that these rules are ‘normal and usual’ enough to be helpful in understanding and defining our national character.
Often, exceptions and deviations may help to ‘prove’ (in the correct sense of ‘test’) a rule, in that the degree of surprise or outrage provoked by the deviation provides an indication of its importance, and the ‘normality’ of the behaviour it prescribes. Many of the pundits conducting premature post-mortems on Englishness make the fundamental mistake of citing breaches of the traditional rules of Englishness (such as, say, the unsportsmanlike behaviour of a footballer or cricketer) as evidence for their diagnosis of death, while ignoring public reaction to such breaches, which clearly shows that they are regarded as abnormal, unacceptable and un-English.