Match the words up with their meaning and give the Russian translation
| guff | behaviour when you are showing that you think you are not very good or important |
| wit | to succeed in doing smth, especially something difficult |
| distinctive | the remarks or behaviour intended to make someone seem stupid, for example laughing at them, copying them, or saying something that is not kind |
| undercurrent | friendly conversation in which people tell jokes and laugh at each other |
| contrive | the ability to use words in a clever way to make people laugh |
| banter | easy to recognize because of being different from other people or things of the same type |
| self-deprecation | a feeling that exists and affects how people behave, but is not obvious or stated directly |
| mockery | nonsense or talk that is meant to impress people but has little meaning |
| underlying | an actor (sometimes may be used humorously) |
| proscription | being based on smth, having developed from it, or influenced by it |
| earnestness | not obvious, and therefore difficult to notice |
| subtle | being very obvious |
| impeccable | prohibition of smth in order to end the existence or use of something |
| glaring | a feeling of being more serious and determined than before, of really meaning what you say |
| rooted in | thinking oneself very important and speaking or behaving in a very serious and formal way |
| arrogance | perfect in every way, faultless |
| endearing | to allow yourself to have or do something that you enjoy |
| gushing | behaviour that shows that you think you are better or more important than other people |
| pompous | making people like you |
| indulge in | existing under the surface of something |
| thespian | expressing admiration or pleasure with so much enthusiasm that people think you are not sincere |
| dismiss | used for telling someone to stop doing or saying something |
| luvvie [‘lΛvi] (luvvy) | to notice something or someone |
| ban n | to refuse to accept that something might be true or important |
| lapse | very enthusiastic and sincere, especially about something you believe in or support |
| spot | an official statement ordering people not to do, sell, or use something |
| scornful | a person or organization that prepares a poll |
| come off it | the number of voters in an election |
| pollster | having the tendency to do something |
| turnout | an actor, especially one who you think is silly because they think their job is very serious and important |
| fervent | feeling or expressing content or disdain |
| be given to | a short or temporary period when you fail or forget to do things in the right way |
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| unseemly | spreading through the whole of something and becoming a very obvious feature of it |
| humbly | making a wrong judgment about a person or situation |
| concur | the organ in a woman's or female animal's body where a baby grows before it is born |
| pervasiveness | producing a lot of ideas, instances of something |
| piquant [‘pi:kənt] | embarrassing or upsetting people because it is not suitable in a particular situation |
| womb [wu:m] | to agree with someone or something |
| prolific | meekly and modestly |
| zeal | something that is annoying and is a continuing problem |
| feign | extremely bad or shocking |
| deadpan | a jest that refers to things that only a particular group of people know about |
| nuisance | having a strong and pleasant flavour, being very exciting and interesting |
| misjudgement | great energy, effort, and enthusiasm |
| in-joke | to pretend to have a particular feeling |
| horrendous | pretending to be serious when you are really joking |
| restraint | done in an obvious way that shows you are not embarrassed or ashamed to be doing something bad or illegal |
| therein | not planned or done in an organized way |
| blatant | a student who works extremely hard and has no time for other activities |
| fiancé [fi’a:nsei] | to announce something publicly in a way that is intended to make it seem very important |
| as clever as it’s cracked up to be | not deliberately, and without realizing what you are doing, accidentally |
| hit-or-miss | the man you are engaged to and are going to get married to |
| swot | in a particular place, activity, or piece of writing that has been mentioned |
| trumpet | used for saying that something is not as good as people say that it is |
| inadvertently | the limit or control of the expression of strong emotion or opinion |
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| call smb’s bluff | not willing to change your ideas, attitudes, opinions |
| backfire | extremely silly, absurdly |
| it serves us right | to ask someone to do what they are threatening to do because you believe they do not intend to do it, but want to trick you in order to gain an advantage over you |
| ludicrously [‘lu:dikrəs] | to have the opposite effect to the one that you wanted |
| rigid | used for saying that you think someone deserves something unpleasant that happens to them |
Exercises
A. Fill in the blanks with the suitable words and expressions:
Cringe, baffle, flea, clumsy, much-vaunted, to beam, wince, vaguely, urge n
- He _____________ ability to speak seven languages was the main reason she got the job.
- Oh my! The dog got ________ ! We need to buy a special ointment.
- When I was a child I was so _________ that not a day went by without me hurting myself in some way.
- She _________ when she saw Jim. She obviously likes him.
- You have to contain the _________ to speak to her. You haven’t been properly introduced!
- I ____________ and ____________ when I heard him bragging about his wealth and athletic abilities.
- This equation ___________ me. I can’t figure it out.
- This man looks ______________ familiar. I must’ve seen him somewhere.
B. Answer the questions using the following words and expressions:
Gossip, affect, impeccably, self-conscious, decline, to deal with
1. How does one need to be dressed when accompanying a woman to an opera?
2. How do you politely say no to a drink when offered one?
3. What effect does bad weather have on you?
4. In what situations do you feel ill-at-ease?
5. Do you like discussing other people behind their backs?
6. What do you do when you notice that somebody’s trying to deceive you?
C. Translate using the following words and expressions:
Considering, commodity, have much to do with, clue, minutiae, obsession, pry, scruples
1. Я считаю, что его неспособность завязать разговор во многом связана с его работой.
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2. Они обсудили все детали разговора.
3. У меня нет никаких угрызений совести по этому поводу.
4. Его увлечение музыкой начинает раздражать его родителей.
5. Если он не хочет говорить об этом, то не надо настаивать.
6. Я чувствую себя хорошо, учитывая, какая высокая температура была у меня на прошлой неделе.
7. Нефть – такой драгоценный ресурс, что ее называют «черное золото».
8. Я без понятия, почему он так сделал.
D. Answer the questions using suitable words and expressions:
1. What guess would you hazard about a person’s not coming to school for a long time?
2. What are you likely to do next weekend?
3. What is of crucial importance when one’s learning to swim?
4. What activity would you consider too highbrow for you?
5. Do you believe that greenhouse effect exists and is gradually changing the climate?
6. What do you reveal with pride about yourself?
7. Doing what do you feel the feeling of elation?
8. Where is it not appropriate to smoke?
GRAMMAR
1. В английском языке определениями к существительному могут быть целые фразы (обычно от первого лица):
I hate his ‘I am the strongest man around” attitude. – Я ненавижу это его отношение ко всем, что он типа самый сильный.
TRANSLATE
She expressed her dislike with a finger-down-throat ‘I’m going to be sick’ gesture.
Low-status, insecure people tend to take and even sometimes make calls during a business lunch – often apologizing and giving reasons, but in such a self-important ‘I’m so busy and indispensable’ manner that their ‘apology’ is really a disguised boast.
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2. Выражение ( TO BE ) BORDERING ON + ADJ значит БЫТЬ НА ГРАНИ/ПОЧТИ:
He was unfriendly bordering on rude. – Она была недружелюбна, почти груба
TRANSLATE
This expression is bordering on incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with English modesty rules.
3. Выражение FAR FROM + ADJ / GERUND обычно переводится СОВЕРШЕННО/АБСОЛЮТНО НЕ:
Far from trying to sound cynical, I’d still like to say that… - Мне абсолютно не хочется, чтобы это прозвучало цинично, но мне все-таки хотелось бы заметить, что…
TRANSLATE
It later emerged that far from finding the intellectual demands of Oxford ‘beyond him’, he had entered with a scholarship and graduated with a First.
MATCH UP DIALOGUE PARTS
PART 1 (first sentence)
| I don’t understand what’s so subtle about their communication? | She’s too gushy and full of self-deprecation. | Let’s stop. I felt a distinctive pain in my leg, I can’t dismiss it. |
| He’s a pompous ass. And he’s not as clever as he’s cracked up to be. | Why are you so scornful toward him? He’s an impeccable gentleman! | The pollsters were amazed at the turnout. |
| I humbly admit that you’re a better thespian than I. | This is a horrendous, glaring error! | He is horseback riding with such zeal! He’s so fervent about it! |
| This guy is given to insulting other people. I don’t want to be his friend any more. | He was indulging in blatant self-promotion saying he was a well-known producer until somebody called his bluff. | This country introduced a ban on cigarettes. The law’s pretty rigid. |
PART 2 (reply, reaction)
| Serves you right! Remember, you thought him endearing just a week ago. | She’s feigning it. There’s an underlying sense of humour in everything she says. | Actually, it’s a bit of a nuisance. You should hear the mockery and arrogance in his voice when he’s talking about anybody who can’t ride. |
| He isn’t. I noticed a lapse in his manners yesterday when he was talking to my fiancé. | It’s a banter with an undercurrent of clever in-jokes. | Yes, it was a misjudgement on the part of the pundits that people were not interested in this issue. |
| It’s not physical, I am sure. It’s rooted in the race you lost you had 20 years ago. | Yes, I heard about the proscription. | Come off it! You can’t say it in all earnestness! |
| I’m sorry, I made it inadvertently. | I concur. He’s ludicrously self-important. | Yes, his plan to impress the company clearly backfired. |
HUMOUR RULES
There is an awful lot of guff talked about the English Sense of Humour, including many patriotic attempts to prove that our sense of humour is somehow unique and superior to everyone else’s. Many English people seem to believe that we have some sort of global monopoly, if not on humour itself, then at least on certain ‘brands’ of humour – the high-class ones such as wit and especially irony. My findings indicate that while there may indeed be something distinctive about English humour, the real ‘defining characteristic’ is the value we put on humour, the central importance of humour in English culture and social interactions.
In other cultures, there is ‘a time and a place’ for humour; it is a special, separate kind of talk. In English conversation, there is always an undercurrent of humour. We can barely manage to say ‘hello’ or comment on the weather without somehow contriving to make a bit of a joke out of it, and most English conversations will involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, understatement, humorous self-deprecation, mockery or just silliness.
THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING EARNEST RULE
At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of ‘earnestness’. Although we may not have a monopoly on humour, or even on irony, the English are probably more acutely sensitive than any other nation to the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘solemn’, between ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’.
This distinction is crucial to any kind of understanding of Englishness. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: if you are not able to grasp these subtle but vital differences, you will never understand the English – and even if you speak the language fluently, you will never feel or appear entirely at home in conversation with the English. Your English may be impeccable, but your behavioural ‘grammar’ will be full of glaring errors.
The ability to laugh at ourselves, although it may be rooted in a form of arrogance, is one of the more endearing characteristics of the English. (At least, I hope I am right about this: if I have overestimated our ability to laugh at ourselves, this book will be rather unpopular.)
To take a deliberately extreme example, the kind of hand-on-heart, gushing earnestness and pompous, Bible-thumping solemnity favoured by almost all American politicians would never win a single vote in this country… The same goes for the gushy, tearful acceptance speeches of American actors at the Oscars and other awards ceremonies, to which English television viewers across the country all respond with the same finger-down-throat ‘I’m going to be sick’ gesture. You will rarely see English Oscar-winners indulging in these heart-on-sleeve displays – their speeches tend to be either short and dignified or self-deprecatingly humorous, and even so they nearly always manage to look uncomfortable and embarrassed. Any English thespian who dares to break these unwritten rules is ridiculed and dismissed as a ‘luvvie’.
The ‘Oh, Come Off It!’ Rule
The English ban on earnestness, and specifically on taking oneself too seriously, means that our own politicians and other public figures have a particularly tough time. The sharp-eyed English public is even less tolerant of any breaches of these rules on home ground, and even the smallest lapse – the tiniest sign that a speaker may be overdoing the intensity and crossing the fine line from sincerity to earnestness – will be spotted and picked up on immediately, with scornful cries of ‘Oh, come off it!’ … This may be why, as someone once said, the English have satire instead of revolutions.
Many cannot even be bothered to vote in national elections, although the pollsters and pundits cannot seem to agree on whether our shamefully low turnout is due to cynicism or apathy – or, the most likely answer, a bit of both. Most of those who do vote, do so in much the same highly sceptical spirit, choosing the ‘best of a bad lot’ or the ‘lesser of two evils’, rather than with any shining-eyed, fervent conviction that this or that party is really going to make the world a better place. Such a suggestion would be greeted with the customary ‘Oh, come off it!’
IRONY RULES
The English are not usually given to patriotic boasting – indeed, both patriotism and boasting are regarded as unseemly, so the combination of these two sins is doubly distasteful. But there is one significant exception to this rule, and that is the patriotic pride we take in our sense of humour, particularly in our expert use of irony. The popular belief is that we have a better, more subtle, more highly developed sense of humour than any other nation, and specifically that other nations are all tediously literal in their thinking and incapable of understanding or appreciating irony. Almost all of the English people I interviewed subscribed to this belief, and many foreigners, rather surprisingly, humbly concurred.
What is unique about English humour is the pervasiveness of irony and the importance we attach to it. Irony is the dominant ingredient in English humour, not just a piquant flavouring. Irony rules. The English, according to an acute observer of the minutiae of Englishness, are ‘conceived in irony. We float in it from the womb. It’s the amniotic fluid . . . Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.’
It must be said that many of my foreign informants found this aspect of Englishness frustrating, rather than amusing: ‘The problem with the English,’ complained one American visitor, ‘is that you never know when they are joking – you never know whether they are being serious or not’.
The Understatement Rule
The reasons for our prolific understating are not hard to discover: our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement. Rather than risk exhibiting any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal, we go to the opposite extreme and feign dry, deadpan indifference. The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; an act of abominable cruelty is ‘not very friendly’, and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is ‘not very clever’; the Antarctic is ‘rather cold’ and the Sahara ‘a bit too hot for my taste’…
The understatement is also difficult for foreigners to ‘get’ because it is, in effect, an in-joke about our own unwritten rules of humour. When we describe, say, a horrendous, traumatic and painful experience as ‘not very pleasant’, we are acknowledging the taboo on earnestness and the rules of irony, but at the same making fun of our ludicrously rigid obedience to these codes. We are exercising restraint, but in such an exaggerated manner that we are also (quietly) laughing at ourselves for doing so. We are parodying ourselves. Every understatement is a little private joke about Englishness.
The Self-deprecation Rule
Like the English understatement, English self-deprecation can be seen as a form of irony. It usually involves not genuine modesty but saying the opposite of what we really mean – or at least the opposite of what we intend people to understand.
The modesty that we actually display is generally false – or, to put it more charitably, ironic.
And therein lies the humour. Again, we are not talking about obvious, thigh-slapping funniness: the humour of English self-deprecation, like that of the English understatement, is understated, often to the point of being almost imperceptible – and bordering on incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with English modesty rules.
To show how it works, however, I will take a relatively blatant example. My fiancé is a brain surgeon. When we first met, I asked what had led him to choose this profession. ‘Well, um,’ he replied, ‘I read PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics] at Oxford, but I found it all rather beyond me, so, er, I thought I’d better do something a bit less difficult.’ I laughed, but then, as he must have expected, protested that surely brain surgery could not really be described as an easy option. This gave him a further opportunity for self-deprecation. ‘Oh no, it’s nowhere near as clever as it’s cracked up to be; to be honest it’s actually a bit hit-or-miss. It’s just plumbing, really, plumbing with a microscope – except plumbing’s rather more accurate.’ It later emerged, as he must have known it would, that far from finding the intellectual demands of Oxford ‘beyond him’, he had entered with a scholarship and graduated with a First. ‘I was a dreadful little swot,’ he explained.
Among ourselves, this system works perfectly well: everyone understands that the customary self-deprecation probably means roughly the opposite of what is said, and is duly impressed, both by one’s achievements and by one’s reluctance to trumpet them.
The problems arise when we English attempt to play this game with people from outside our own culture, who do not understand the rules, fail to appreciate the irony, and therefore have an unfortunate tendency to take our self-deprecating statements at face value. They inadvertently call our bluff, and the whole thing backfires on us. And frankly, it serves us right for being so silly.
WRITE A DIALOGUE WITH THE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS BELOW. TOPIC: TWO MAN ARE TRYING TO PUT THE OPPONENT DOWN IN A VERBAL MOCK FIGHT
underlying
mockery
wit
self-deprecation
distinctive
contrive
glaring
endearing
proscription
come off it
WRITE A COMPOSITION WITH THE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS BELOW.
TOPIC: HOW ARE MEN’S CONVERSATIONS DIFFERENT FROM WOMEN’S?
banter
subtle
rooted in
arrogance
indulge in
pompous
feign
scornful
dismiss
ban n
gushing
earnestness
CHAPTER 4
LINGUISTIC CLASS CODES
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