Match the words up with their meaning and give the Russian translation
| agenda | to have official permission to use smth |
| minutes | an alcoholic drink sold already mixed |
| to pool | a drink for each of the people in a group |
| cover | enthusiastically and completely |
| license | not to approve of smth |
| a round | to give a description of smth |
| overly | to find oneself in a better state after doing smth or because of doing it |
| miserliness | to share smth such as money, ideas, equipment etc with a group of people to work more effectively together |
| reluctance | a cold drink that does not contain any alcohol |
| wholeheartedly | very much or too much |
| frown upon | a list of things that people will discuss at a meeting |
| end up rather better off than | an official written record of what is discussed or decided at a formal meeting |
| soft-drinks | a person who does things thought to be typical of young men, e.g. drinking a lot of alcohol |
| pre-mixed | strong alcoholic drinks such as whisky or brandy |
| lad | unwillingness to do smth |
| spirits | stinginess |
Exercises
A. Fill in the blanks with the suitable words and expressions.
License, agenda, minutes, a round, to pool
- What’s on their business ___________ today?
- Who’s gonna keep the ___________ of the meeting?
- We need to ____________ all our resources if we are to do it.
- A __________ to hunt deer costs $200.
- Who’s buying this _________ ? Our glasses are empty!
B. Answer the questions using the following words and expressions:
Miserliness, end up rather better off than, soft-drinks, pre-mixed, reluctance, wholeheartedly, frown upon
- Why do you think some people are so greedy and stingy?
- Why do you think some people don’t want to get officially married?
- Do you agree that people are basically good?
- When you were a child, what were some of the activities your parents definitely did not like?
- What determined your choice of the languages you learn?
- What do you drink?
MATCH UP DIALOGUE PARTS
PART 1 (first sentence)
| What’s on the agenda today? | Who’s buying the next round! | I hate those pre-mixed drinks, I can only drink wine or spirits. |
| Who will keep the minutes? | His reluctance to meet my wife worries me. | People going into the stock market with the right kind of education and connections end up rather better off than those plunging into it with no knowledge at all. |
| We need more money, quick! | What do you think our parents reaction will be when they find out we are dating? | I understand he is a brave, strong and idealistic person. |
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PART 2 (reply, reaction)
| I think they might frown upon it. | OK, let’s pool our resources. | Yes, this pretty much covers it. |
| I wholeheartedly agree. There’s something weird in it. | I think you are being overly cautious. Don’t over-generalize. There is also such thing as the talent. | By all means it should be Nick! Come on, lad, you need to overcome your miserliness! |
| I am sorry, we are not licensed to sell those. | We are to discuss the finance policy. | I think Sarah should be the protocol person today. |
RULES OF PLAY
PART V
Club Rules
The English are not keen on random, unstructured, spontaneous, street-corner sociability; we are no good at this, and it makes us uneasy. We prefer to socialize in an organised, ordered manner, at specific times and places of our choosing, with rules that we can argue about, an agenda, minutes and a monthly newsletter. Above all, as with sports and games, we need to pretend that the activity of the club or society (…) is the real point of the gathering, and that social bonding is just a secondary side-effect.
It’s that self-delusion thing again. The English constantly form clubs and societies for exactly the same reason that we have so many sports and games: we need props and facilitators to help us engage socially with our fellow humans, to overcome our social dis-ease, and we also need the illusion that we are doing something else, that we have come together for some practical purpose, to pursue a specific shared interest, to pool resources in order to achieve something we could not manage alone.
Pub Rules
Some more pub rules were covered in the section on games, but that still leaves a few quite significant ones, such as the rules governing the consumption of alcohol. I don’t mean the official licensing laws, but the much more important unwritten codes of social drinking.
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Drinking Rules
The rules of round-buying are as follows:
- In any group of two or more people, one person must buy a ‘round’ of drinks for the whole group. This is not an altruistic gesture: the expectation is that the other member or members of the group will each, in turn, buy a round of drinks. When each person has bought a round, the process begins again with the first person.
- Unless the group is drinking at the bar counter, the person who buys the round must also act as waiter. ‘Buying your round’ means not only paying for the drinks, but going to the bar, ordering the drinks and carrying them all back to the table.
- ‘Fairness’ in round-buying is not a matter of strict justice. One person may well end up buying two rounds during a ‘session’, while the other members of the group have only bought one round each. Over several ‘sessions’, rough equality is usually achieved, but it is extremely bad manners to appear overly concerned about this.
- In fact, any sign of miserliness, calculation or reluctance to participate wholeheartedly in the ritual is severely frowned upon. For an English male, saying that someone ‘doesn’t buy his round’ is a dire insult.
- Perhaps surprisingly, I found that on average ‘initiating’ round-buyers (those who regularly buy the first round) actually spend no more money in the long term than ‘waiting’ round-buyers (those who do not offer a round until later in the session). In fact, far from being out-of-pocket, ‘initiators’ often end up rather better off than those who wait, because their popularity and reputation for generosity means that others are inclined to be generous towards them.
- One should never wait until all one’s companions’ glasses are empty before offering to buy the next round. The correct time to say ‘It’s my round’ is when the majority of the glasses are about three-quarters empty.
- It is acceptable occasionally to refuse a drink during the round-buying process, as long as you do not attempt to make an issue or a moral virtue out of your moderate intake, but this does not exempt you from the round-buying obligation. Even if you are drinking less than the others, you should still ‘buy your round’. It would be very rude, however, to refuse a drink that is offered as a ‘peace-making’ gesture, or that is clearly a significant, personal friendship-signal.
You Are What You Drink
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These are the two most important symbolic functions of alcoholic beverages among the English: your choice of drink (in public at least) is determined mainly by your sex and social class, with some age-related variations. The rules are as follows:
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