MATCH UP DIALOGUE PARTS
PART 1 (first sentence)
| What restaurant would you single out to go to? | Randomly select any card you like. Now I’ll snap my fingers and guess which card it was. | If you want to close the lid, turn it clockwise. But careful with the decanter, it’s pretty pricey! | The child hurt himself with fork prongs! |
| She just can’t grasp the fact that I’d eat out rather than set the table at home. | We started working straight off the ship. Are you gonna pitch in? | Their obscene and sinful cohabitation has lasted for too long! They are not even married! | The Johnsons are coming to dinner. Do I need to add napkin rings? |
| Her excellent fishcakes have been much remarked upon. | Her actions at work cast certain doubts upon her qualifications. And all her references are rather oblique. | She’s such a busybody. And the same goes for her husband. | Why can’t you let Jenny watch this film? |
| I like tinned fruit as long as it’s bought at an up-market store. | He’s a well-brought-up boy. Look how he eats his peas, one at a time. | What really set me off was her loud mastication and yelling at the poor publican that she doesn’t like to be kept waiting. | How do I make fire with a lens against the sun? |
PART 2 (reply, reaction)
| It’s too sensual. | It’s convex side down. | You haven’t tried her sweetcorn or fried prawn yet! | We need to summon a doctor! |
| Yes, one would not call her humble or timid, would they? | Relax. They are light-hearted and relaxed people. | Come on, don’t work yourself into a frenzy over your dainty kitchenware! | Wow! You did it as though you were a wizard or whatever! |
| You are much too self-important. Canned goods on average are the same wherever you go. | And then he dabs his lip with a napkin that he didn’t tuck into his collar like everybody else! | Sorry, I am an uncommitted restaurant-goer. I am not an adherent of any cuisine and neither am I a foodie. | True. Stopping them from interfering in other people’s lives is hard if at all possible. |
| Oh, Aunt Julia, you certainly have a mean streak! Who cares as long as they are happy! | Then you should fire her! Maybe she’s just a nobody disguised as a college graduate! | But hasn’t she painstakingly made you dinner specifically to eat in? You shouldn’t grumble about it. | I see the situation does not lend itself for much spare time. I am coming! |
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RULES OF SEX
In other parts of the world, sex may be regarded as a sin, an art form, a healthy leisure activity, a commodity, a political issue and/or a problem requiring years of therapy and umpteen self-help ‘relationship’ books. In England, it is a joke.
FLIRTING RULES
There is nearly always a grain of truth in stereotypes of national character, and the notion that the English are sexually inhibited is, I’m afraid, quite accurate. We may be as competent and indeed as passionate as anyone else once we actually get into bed, but the process of getting there is often awkward and inept.
The idea that our reserve and inhibitions stem from lack of interest in sex, however, is mistaken. We may find the subject embarrassing, but the English have a keen interest in sex. In particular, thanks to the forbidden-fruit effect of our privacy rules, we have a prurient, insatiable fascination with other people’s sex lives, only partially assuaged by a constant stream of sex scandals and kiss-and-tell stories in our tabloid newspapers.
Our interest in our own sex lives ensures that we do our best to overcome our inhibitions, and if we are somewhat inept at flirtation, it is certainly not for want of practice.
(…) The English are genetically programmed to flirt, just like everyone else, and we probably do about as much of it as everyone else. It’s just that we do not do it with the same degree of skill, ease or assurance. Or rather, about fifty percent of us are noticeably deficient in these qualities. If you look more closely at the stereotype of the sexually challenged English, it is the English male who is most often singled out for criticism and ridicule in this department.
The SAS Test
(…) I once devised a test, based on extensive field research, to locate the best ‘flirting zones’ – the social settings most conducive to enjoyable and successful flirtation in this culture; I called it the ‘SAS test’. SAS stands for Sociability, Alcohol and Shared-interest (environments in which people have interests in common … ).
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Parties and Pubs
Parties and celebrations are obvious flirting zones, although they do not always score highly on the Shared-interest factor. Pubs, bars and nightclubs, which seem at first glance like prime candidates, actually only pass two elements of the test – Sociability and Alcohol – failing on Shared-interest. In English pubs and bars, striking up a conversation with an attractive stranger is permitted by the unwritten rules (although subject to certain restrictions and caveats), but the lack of an obvious common interest means that one still has to struggle to think of something to talk about. Generic English etiquette provides a universally acceptable subject in The Weather, but without a shared focus of interest, the introductory process still requires considerable effort.
Clubbers and the ‘No Sex Please, We’re Too Cool’ Rule
Night-clubs score somewhat higher on the Shared-interest factor than pubs and bars, as clubbers usually share a common interest in music. In any case, the problem of initiating conversation is reduced by the volume at which the music is played, which restricts verbal communication to a few monosyllabic shouted exchanges, allowing clubbers to flirt mainly through non-verbal channels. With very high scores on Sociability and Alcohol, night-clubs should in theory be near the top of my English flirt-zone league table but there is a curious and apparently perverse new unwritten rule among a significant proportion of young English clubbers, whereby dancing – and by extension clubbing in general – is regarded as an asexual activity. Their focus is on group bonding, and the euphoric, almost transcendental experience of becoming one with the music and the crowd (…). They take great exception to any suggestion that they might be there for the vulgar, crass purpose of ‘pulling’.
Workplaces
Both ‘flirting with intent’ and ‘recreational flirting’ are common in most English offices and other workplaces. Surveys have found that up to 40 percent of us now meet our spouses or current sexual partners at the workplace, and some recent research findings show that flirting is good for relieving workplace anxiety and stress: the playful atmosphere created by flirtatious banter helps to reduce friction, and exchanges of compliments boost self-esteem.
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Learning-places
Almost all educational establishments are hot-beds of flirting. This is mainly because they are full of young single people making their first attempts at mate selection, but they also pass all three elements of the SAS test – schools, colleges and universities score very high on the Sociability and Shared-interest factors, and while alcohol is not usually served in classrooms, students have plenty of opportunities for drinking together.
Participant Sports, Clubs and Hobbies – and the Incompetence Rule
I found that the level of flirtatious behaviour among members of amateur English sports teams or hobby-clubs tends to be inversely related to the standards achieved by participants and their enthusiasm for the activity. With some exceptions, one tends to find a lot of flirting among incompetent tennis players, unfit hill-walkers, cack-handed painters and tangle-footed dancers, but somewhat less among more proficient, serious, competitive participants in the same activities.
Spectator Events
While they have the advantage of providing conversation topics of mutual interest, and some achieve a reasonable score on the Sociability factor, most sporting events and other spectator pastimes such as theatre or cinema are not particularly conducive to flirting or mate-seeking, as social interaction of any kind is usually limited to a short interval or requires ‘missing the action’.
Singles’ Events, Dating Agencies and the No-date Rule
Singles’ parties, singles’ clubs and agency-arranged dates pass the SAS test, but only just. They don’t score very highly on Shared interest. This may sound daft, as participants have an obvious shared interest in finding a mate, but this interest is too embarrassing to acknowledge, and therefore not much use as a conversation-starter. Even in non-sexual contexts, the English need to pretend that they are gathering for some reason other than just gathering, and the need for another ostensible motive is even greater when something as personal and intimate as mate-seeking is the real purpose of the event.
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Cyberspace – and the Liminality Effect
Cyberspace fails the Alcohol element of the SAS Test (although cyber-flirts can of course provide their own) but scores very highly on Sociability and quite highly on the Shared-interest factor. In cyberspace, unlike most ‘realspace’ public environments in England, striking up conversations with complete strangers is normal behaviour, indeed actively encouraged. Shared interest is ensured by joining a suitable chat room or choosing a prospective partner with similar interests from an online dating-agency portfolio. The ‘liminality effect’ of cyberspace – its disinhibiting powers – make it ideal for socially challenged English flirts.
The Uncertainty Principle
Even when English males are genuinely interested in a female, they may often be reluctant to convey their interest in any obvious or straightforward fashion. We have already established that the English male is: (a) not an accomplished flirt, tending to be either awkward and tongue-tied or crass and boorish, and (b) somewhat uncomfortable with the whole concept of ‘dating’. Defining an encounter with a female as a ‘date’ is a bit too explicit, too official, too clear-cut and unambiguous – the sort of embarrassing ‘cards on the table’ declaration of intent that the naturally cautious, indirect English male prefers to avoid.
Ideally, the English male would rather not issue any definite invitation at all, sexual or social, preferring to achieve his goal through a series of subtle hints and oblique manoeuvres, often so understated as to be almost undetectable. This ‘uncertainty principle’ has a number of advantages: the English male is not required to exhibit any emotions; he avoids entangling himself too soon in anything that could possibly be described as a ‘relationship’ (a term he detests even more than ‘date’); he does not have to do or say anything ‘soppy’, so he maintains his stiff-upper-lipped masculine dignity; and, above all, by never making any direct, unequivocal request, he avoids the humiliation of a direct, unequivocal rejection.
The Rules of Banter
In most other cultures, flirtation and courtship involve exchanges of compliments: among the English, you are more likely to hear exchanges of insults. Well, mock-insults, to be precise. ‘Banter’, we call it, and it is one of our most popular forms of verbal interaction generally (on a par with moaning), as well as our main flirting method.
The rules of flirtatious banter allow courting couples to communicate their feelings for each other without ever saying what they really mean, which would be embarrassing. In fact, the banter rules require them to say the opposite of what they mean – something at which the English excel. Here is a verbatim extract from a typical flirtatious encounter, recorded on a bus, between two teenagers.
‘You gotta licence for that shirt? Or are you wearing it for a bet?’
‘Huh! Look who’s talking – I can see your knickers, you slag!’
‘It’s a thong, you nerd – not that you’d know the difference. And that’s the closest you’ll ever get to it.’
‘Who says I’d want to? What makes you think I fancy you? You’re such a slag!’
‘Better than being a sad geek!’
‘Bitch!’
‘Geek!’
‘Sla – Oh, that’s my stop – you coming out later?’
‘Yeah – come round about eight.’
‘Right.’
‘Bye.’
As with the uncertainty principle, foreign females do not have this instinctive, in-built understanding of English male peculiarities, and so tend to be baffled and sometimes offended by the banter rules. I find myself having to explain to them that ‘silly cow’ really can be a term of endearment, and ‘You’re just not my type’, uttered in the right tones and in the context of banter, can be tantamount to a proposal of marriage.
MALE-BONDING RULES – AND THE GIRLWATCHING RITUAL
The English male may not be an accomplished flirt, or adept at the finer points of pair bonding, but when it comes to bonding with other males, he’s in his element. I’m not talking about homosexuality, repressed or otherwise, but about the universal human practice of male bonding, of men forming close friendships and alliances with other men.
Foremost among these is the ‘girlwatching’ ritual – the English version of that time-honoured and probably universal male pastime of exchanging comments on the physical attributes of passing females. You can – if you are interested in such things – watch variations on this ritual in pretty much any pub, bar, café, night-club or street-corner on the planet. The English variant is, as you might by now expect, conducted in code. Very few of the set phrases used are intelligible without some interpretation. The code is not, however, difficult to decipher, and most of the stock phrases fall into one of two simple categories: approval (that female is attractive) and disapproval (that female is not attractive).
The most quintessentially and convolutedly English of these stock girlwatching remarks is my favourite: ‘Don’t fancy yours much!’ This is a standard comment on any pair of females, one of whom the speaker considers to be less attractive than the other. As well as demonstrating that he can tell the difference (and has a healthy, red-blooded interest in attractive females) the speaker is ‘laying claim’ to the more desirable of the pair, by designating the less pretty one as ‘yours’.
On one occasion, in a pub in Birmingham, I recorded the following exchange:
Male 1, glancing up as a group of 4 women enters the pub: ‘Don’t fancy yours much!’
Male 2, turning to look at the women, then frowning in puzzlement: ‘Er, which?’
Male 1, laughing: ‘Don’t care, mate – take your pick: they’re all yours!’
Male 2 laughs, but somewhat grudgingly, looking a bit put-out, as a point has been scored against him.
Another somewhat cryptic English girlwatching phrase, this time of the ‘approving’ variety, is ‘Not many of those to the pound!’ This comment refers to the size of the observed female’s breasts, implying that they are rather larger than average. The ‘pound’ means a pound in weight, not in sterling – so the phrase literally means that you would not get many of those breasts balanced like fruit on a grocer’s weighing-scale against a pound weight.
‘I would!’ is a rather more obvious generic expression of approval, the message being that the speaker would be willing to have sex with the observed female. ‘Definitely a ten-pinter!’ is a derogatory remark, meaning that the speaker would have to consume ten pints of beer – that is, be very drunk – even to consider having sexual relations with the female in question. When you overhear a pair or group of English men saying ‘six’, ‘four’, ‘two’, ‘seven’ and so on, while surreptitiously scrutinizing nearby or passing females, they may not be awarding the women ‘marks out of ten’, but referring to the number of pints they would have to drink in order to contemplate having sex with them.
CLASS RULES
The Class-endogamy Rule
Like every other aspect of our lives, sex among the English is subject to class rules. (…) There is an unofficial class-endogamy rule, whereby intermarriage between the social classes, although not actually forbidden, tends to be discouraged, and in practice does not occur very often.
The ‘Marrying-up’ Rule
Working-class intellectual males are often attracted to precisely this type of slightly rebellious upper-middle-class female, and may end up marrying one. Although there are no doubt many exceptions, such marriages tend to be somewhat less successful than those in which the female partner is the one ‘marrying up’. This is because an unwritten rule requires the partner who is ‘marrying up’ to adopt the tastes and manners of the class he or she is marrying into, or at least to make rather more compromises and adjustments than the higher-class partner, and upwardly mobile women tend to be more willing to do this than upwardly mobile men.
The Working-class Potency Myth
Some upper-middle females are fascinated by working-class males at least partly because of a widely held belief that working-class men are more virile and better lovers than middle- or upper-class men. There is no empirical evidence to justify this belief. Working-class males may start having sex at a slightly earlier age than the higher echelons, but in general they do not have sex more often, nor is there any reason to believe that their partners enjoy it more.
Post-Coital Englishness
Après sex or, if we have fallen asleep, the next morning, we revert to the usual state of awkward Englishness. We say:
‘I’m terribly sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your name . . . ?’
‘Would you mind very much if I borrowed a towel?’
‘I’ll just go and put the kettle on . . .’
‘No! Monty! Put it down! We don’t eat the nice lady’s bra! What will she think of us? Drop it! Bad dog!’
‘Sorry it’s a bit burnt: the toaster’s a bit temperamental, I’m afraid – doesn’t like Mondays or something . . .’
‘Oh, no, it’s very nice. Ooh, yes – tea! Lovely, thank you!’
All right, I’m exaggerating a little – but not much: all these are genuine, verbatim morning-after quotes.
WRITE A DIALOGUE WITH THE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS BELOW. TOPIC: YOU AND YOUR FRIEND ARE TALKING AND LYING ALL THE TIME
assuage
score highly on
prime candidate
deficient in
devise
a grain of truth
inept
conducive to
stand for
commodity
caveat
perverse
but only just
genuinely
WRITE A COMPOSITION WITH THE WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS BELOW.
TOPIC: IS IT OK TO LIE?
take great exception to
boost
unequivocal
insult
on a par with
hot-bed of
make their first attempts at
excel at smth
in straightforward fashion
for a bet
baffled
tantamount to
accomplished
nerd
stock phrase
to lay claim
fancy smb
time-honoured
take your pick
CHAPTER 14
PART 1
RITES OF PASSAGE
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