- •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
The ‘Small/Slow Is Beautiful’ Principle
And it’s not just peas. I chose peas as an example because people poke fun at English pea eating – and because peas are somehow intrinsically more amusing than other foods – but our codes of class-indicator table etiquette prescribe the prongs-down, spear-and-squash method for all eating that is done with a knife and fork. And as almost all eating is supposed to be done with both implements, almost all foods must be speared and/or squashed onto the backs of forks. Only a limited number of specified foods – first courses and salads, for example, or spaghetti or shepherd’s pie – may be eaten with the fork alone, in the right hand, with the prongs pointing upwards.
When using both knife and fork, only the lower classes adopt the American system of first cutting up all or most of the food, then putting down the knife and shovelling up the food with the fork alone. The ‘correct’ – or rather, socially superior – approach is to cut up and eat your meat and other foods one small piece at a time, each time spearing and squashing a little selection of food on to the prongs and the back of your fork.
The same ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘slow is beautiful’ principles seem to be at the root of many of the class-indicator rules, or at any rate a large proportion of these rules appear to be designed to ensure that only small amounts of food are transferred from plate to mouth at a time, with clear pauses between mouthfuls for cutting, spearing and so on. The cut-spear-squash system for peas, meat and pretty much everything else on your plate is the main example, but these principles extend to other foods as well.
Take bread, for example. The correct (‘posh’) way to eat anything involving bread – rolls and butter, pâté and toast, breakfast toast and marmalade – is to break off (not cut off) a bite-sized piece of the bread or toast, spread butter/pâté/marmalade onto just that small piece, eat it in one small bite, then repeat the procedure with another small piece. It is considered vulgar to spread butter or whatever across the whole slice of toast or half-roll, as though you were making a batch of sandwiches for a picnic, and then bite into it. Biscuits or crackers served with cheese must be eaten in the same way as bread or toast, breaking off and spreading one small, bite-sized piece at a time.
With fish on the bone, the ‘small/slow is beautiful’ principle requires that we fillet the fish one small bit at a time, lifting each mouthful away from the bone, eating it, then filleting off the next mouthful. Grapes must be broken off in a small bunch, and eaten one at a time, not in handfuls. At the table, apples and other fruit are peeled, quartered and eaten one segment at a time, not bitten into whole. Bananas must not be eaten ‘monkey style’ but should be peeled and cut into discs, which are then eaten one at a time. And so on.
Do you see the recurring small-and-slow pattern here? Class-indicator rules are not about eating with any degree of ease, speed, efficiency or practicality. Quite the opposite: they are designed to slow us down, to make things deliberately difficult, to ensure that we eat the smallest possible mouthfuls in the most time-consuming, laborious manner. Now that we’ve identified the pattern and the principle behind it, the purpose becomes clear. What it all boils down to is not appearing to be greedy, and, more specifically, not appearing to give food too high a priority. Greed of any sort is a breach of the all-important fair-play rule. Letting one’s desire for food take priority over making conversation with one’s companions involves giving physical pleasure or gratification a higher value than words. In polite society, this is frowned upon as un-English and highly embarrassing. Over-eagerness about anything is undignified; over-eagerness about food is disgusting and even somehow faintly obscene. Eating small mouthfuls, with plenty of pauses in between them, shows a more restrained, unemotional, English approach to food.