Call me an inveterate snob, but I feel an acute sense of schadenfreude when reading about Americans living in England or just visiting.
Lately, The Mail has been publishing articles on the culture shocks experienced by such innocent visitors to our shores, and none of them is a PLU (if you don’t know what this acronym stands for, you aren’t a PLU yourself).
Birds of a feather and all that, it’s natural that the English people those Americans know also come from the lowly strata of society. Visiting Americans may not be aware of our social nuances, and there is no reason they should be, but one would expect Mail journalists to enlighten them.
I’m sure they could if they wanted to, but most of their paper’s readers belong to the same demographic group. They can let The Mail get away with utter, even subversive bilge (Peter Hitchens springs to mind), but they’ll never forgive even a hint of class snobbery.
That’s why the paper allows those culturally shocked Americans to persist in the folly that their comments apply to Britons at large, rather than strictly to those of the proletarian persuasion.
The other day, for example, one perplexed visitor wrote about his confusion over tea. Not only are Britons obsessed with that beverage, he complained, but they use the word to describe the main meal of the day. Go figure.
I don’t propose to write a treatise on the class structure of British society, with its main groups, each featuring any number of hyphenated sub-groups. However, simplifying the structure to just three tiers, low, middle and high, no member of the two top groups would ever refer to a major meal as ‘tea’.
However, when I myself moved from the US to London, I too was taken aback when my advertising colleagues asked what I was cooking for tea that evening. Tea for me was strictly a hot (in America, sometimes iced) drink accompanied by a biscuit (cookie to Americans) or drunk on its own.
Moving up the social scale in the after hours, I referred to the evening meal as ‘dinner’ or more usually ‘supper’. But, being sensitive to the perverse vagaries of English usage, I knew that ‘dinner’ to my co-workers and their class comrades often described lunch.
Thus, when a London taxi driver declines a fare at noon, saying, “I’m going ‘ome to ‘ave me dinner”, he doesn’t mean he is driving to Liverpool to be just in time for his wife’s Lancashire hotpot.
The same chap, by the way, could confuse Americans even more by describing them as either ‘Shermans’ or ‘Septics’, but Cockney rhyming slang deserves a separate essay. (Just this once I’ll help out the outlanders among you by explaining that a Sherman or septic describes a tank, which rhymes with ‘Yank’. Such are the little word games played within earshot of Bow Bells.)
Britons who use such locutions seldom mean them as a compliment. For example, my erstwhile co-worker Barry detested septic tourists.
Truth to tell, Barry didn’t have much time for any foreigners, but he felt he could be more open about his animosity to Shermans. They were a free hit, and one could indulge one’s feelings without being accused of racism or Euroscepticism.
Barry lived for the moments when an American tourist asked him for directions to, say, Hampton Court. Barry’s stock reply was: “Take the Piccadilly Line, go to Cockfosters, then get out and ask again.” Those familiar with London’s geography will know that such a wild-goose chase would take the hapless sightseer at least two hours out of his way.
Another quaint idiosyncrasy spotted by the same confused visitors to The Mail‘s pages is that Britons apologise all the time in situations that don’t call for excuses in America. ‘Sorry’ with various adverbal modifiers, such as ‘awfully’ or ‘terribly’, seems to be the most popular locution.
So it may be, but only in the middle classes, especially the lower reaches therein. As one climbs the social ladder, self-confidence increases, and apologies are heard less and less.
Some Americans are amazed at the absence of power sockets in our bathrooms. This is indeed an abomination, but one motivated not by class but by what’s fondly described as ‘elf and safety.
Our powers that be are concerned that, should sockets be available in bathrooms, an irate husband might plug a hairdryer in and drop it in the tub just as his wife (‘missus’, ‘old lady’ or ‘trouble’ to Mail readers) is taking a bath.
And speaking of that facility, some Shermans have trouble with the word ‘toilet’, as do I, but for different reasons. Their response is TMI (Too Much Information), an offence avoided by their own awful euphemisms, such as restroom, powder room, little boys’ room and some such, all prole, which euphemisms so often tend to be.
Alas, this is the only room in the house for which no non-euphemistic name exists.
The flushing facility we take for granted (but one about 14 per cent of all Russians still don’t have) was invented by the Victorian plumber Thomas Crapper, an aptronymic surname if I’ve ever seen one. For a while, he lent his name to the room, but that didn’t last because of the term’s association with an older and cruder Anglo-Saxon word.
Britons can’t escape excretional euphemisms, but they can arrange them in the ascending order of social acceptability. Thus, ‘toilet’ is strictly prole in the UK (though not so much in the US). Penelope, for example, is physically unable to articulate it.
At the opposite end of the social scale sit words like ‘lavatory’, ‘lav’ or ‘loo’. The first one is a smidgen more PLU than the other two. ‘Lav’ is obviously a shortened ‘lavatory’, whereas ‘loo’ comes from ‘Waterloo’, supposedly because at the time Mr Crapper died British outhouses bore that brand name.
My own theory is that the connection with Waterloo is rather different. That room used to be called ‘water closet’, and the perverse English mind formed an association with Waterloo, later abbreviated to ‘loo’. Just a guess.
Americans also cause the natives’ mirth by struggling with the pronunciation of words like Leicester and Gloucester, both featuring in the name of tube stations. Not only do they laboriously and amusingly articulate every syllable, but they even can’t understand those words when properly pronounced as ‘Lester’ and ‘Gloster’.
Those chaps are lucky they don’t revolve in the circles inhabited by Messrs Featherstonehaugh and Cholmondeley, pronounced ‘Fanshaw’ and ‘Chumly’. If they did, they’d have even more to complain about, but I doubt The Mail would print such gripes.
As a born Londoner (though not authentically Cockney) I commend today’s piece for its accuracy. Only one pair of the article’s expressions was not part of my 1940’s upbringing.
Bernie
I’ve always associated “lav” and its variant “lavvy” with the lower classes.
The latest edition of Chambers’s Dictionary (or The Chambers Dictionary, as its apostrophophobic editors now call it) records the suggestion that “loo” derives from Waterloo, but also indicates possible associations with French l’eau or lieu, for which it gives no lesser names than Smollett and Sterne as authorities.
I suspect that “toilet” originated among social aspirants who had heard the word but didn’t know what it meant. “Tea” as a substitute for dinner may have had a similarly aspirational origin. But “dinner” is the right name for the biggest meal of the day, whether one eats it at noon or at night.
Finally, I have nothing against Americans. I was even engaged to one of them once, until she came to her senses. But it would be fair to call the kind of tourists you describe not as Shermans or even Septics, but a bunch of complete Barclay’s Bankers.
Or Merchants, as the case may be. Our biggest meal is at around 2 PM, and we call it lunch. The few nibbles we eat in the evening are supper. The only big midday meal I’ve ever heard PLUs call ‘dinner’ is eaten at Christmas, but there must exist variances even within that group. I didn’t know of the association of ‘loo’ with l’eau, but I’m not surprised. After all, the tennis term ‘love’ comes from l’oeuf in reference to its zero-like shape.
I grew up eating lunch and supper just as you do, though supper was the larger of the two meals except on Sundays. But the midday meal at school (a reasonably good school) was always called dinner, and perhaps it still is.
Notoriously, the French dîner and déjeuner both derive from late Latin disjejunare, “to break fast”. The use of such words has evidently been a matter more of fashion than of common sense for many centuries.
I think it’s important to distinguish the distinction between PLU and non-PLU from Nancy Mitford’s distinction between U and non-U. It’s more important to eat one’s meals like a gentleman than to call them by gentlemanly names. So, all together now:
“‘Phone for the fish-knives, Norman…”
Just one man’s observation, but those who don’t eat meals like gentlemen tend not to call by gentlemanly names either, and vice versa. As for Nancy Mitford, I’ve introduced my French friends to her, and they are very grateful. I too prefer PLU to U — the former is what you become, the latter is what you are born. But then I would, with my pedigree, wouldn’t I? Another observation: the Italian for breakfast is ‘prima collazione’. Hence, when they speak English, many of them say “first breakfast”. And the French, of course, say ‘little breakfast’, which is breakfast proper, and then ‘breakfast’ (déjeuner), which is lunch. Go figure, as Americans would put it.
I find Nancy Mitford’s novels impenetrably boring, but I enjoy her letters.
I share the ambition of Mallarmé and Eliot to “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,” or “to purify the dialect of the tribe,” but it’s hard to see how to impose order on the multilingual chaos of meal names.
At least neither Mallarmé nor Eliot nor Mitford nor even Betjeman was confronted with “brunch”, either as a word or as a thing.