I’m a huge fan of Lynne Murphy’s blog: separated by a common language where she delves into all sorts of interesting differences between British and American English. I’m also a huge fan of TED videos, and obviously I’m interested in linguistic politeness and British and ‘merican – it’s what this blog is about.
Well guess what! A TED talk by Lynne on linguisitic politeness and British and ‘merican has just arrived on youtube. Hurrah! Enjoy!
By: tirtmaster
Wehey! Learning to speak ‘merican is back on line! 🙂 Thank you all for your patience. In fact what’s happened here is it has split into two blogs. You’re at the one about pragmatics and sociolinguistics here and there’s another one for teaching issues. Both site feeds should work now, but you will need to do an update because I’ve had to change the address. Please check the side bar for details.So where were we before we got disconnected? Ah yes, politeness.
There’s an interesting feature of politeness that, for want of a better term, I generally call “the prick factor’. The thing is, if you call someone else a prick, it’s very likely that’ll you’ll wind up looking like a prick yourself.
In simple logic it shouldn’t work that way. If you put someone else down, it should show how much better than them you are, and so enhance your standing. But politeness operates to much more subtle rules than that.
Mitt Romney illustrated what a pesky problem it can be in London earlier this week when he lectured his British hosts on their security. It must have seemed like a golden opportunity to remind everyone that he had “saved” the Salt Lake City olympics. But instead it wound up with him being dubbed ‘Mitt the Twit’ by the Sun and spawning pictures like the one top right on the web.
I’m not sure how most Americans will have interpreted the incident. My guess is the rudeness and his too-little-too-late-back-peddling won’t have passed unnoticed. And of course it’s damaged his international reputation, but actually I don’t think many Americans will care much about that.
Another thing I’m still wondering about is what did Americans make of the celebrations of the National Health Service in the opening ceremony? Did it seem odd to be celebrating ‘socialized medicine’, as its known here? Oh and what did y’all think of the opening ceremony?
UPDATE!
Duh, I forgot. One of the other reasons I wanted to write about the Olympics was because I wanted to share this article on British politeness from the Guardian. Enjoy!
I’ve mentioned before that something that used to surprise me is that when that an American sees a random person walking along the street, they’re quite likely to ask, ‘How are you doing?’ This is someone they don’t know and who they’re unlikely to meet again. Aside from the intrusiveness of the question, do they really want to know?
Foreign visitors are often surprised by American friendliness too. ‘Is it fake?’ they ask. I don’t think so. I think it’s rather like a Tagalog speaker who greets people with ‘Where are you going?’ expecting the answer ‘Over there’; or a Taiwanese speaker who greets you with ‘Have you eaten yet?’, when they have no intention of inviting you for a meal; In China, a greeting might go ‘Old Zhang, are you busy today?’ Rather than ‘Less of the old, please’ the standard response is ‘Very busy’ or ‘Not very busy’. What we’re looking at here are rituals, procedures we all follow without thinking about them.
The ritual for greeting a passer-by is different in the UK. As a rule, we don’t. It’s not that we want to be unsociable but they might be engaged in their own thoughts and we wouldn’t want to intrude. Should something embarrassing happen, like our eyes accidentally meeting, a brief nod or ‘Morning’ enables us both to swiftly pass on.
By: Maryland GovPics
The British non-intrusion approach and also operates when we’re at an event like a party, even though everyone knows the purpose for being there is to socialize. After fortifying ourselves with a couple of glasses of wine, we might signal our willingness to talk by passing a comment on the weather, or food or something happening in the room at the time. But we haven’t yet mastered the art of going up to strangers, sticking out our hand and saying, ‘Hi I’m Vicki from Pennsylvania.’ I was astonished with the aplomb with which Americans handled that when I came here.
Another similar post on farewells: http://www.vickihollett.com/?p=1406
By: Images Money
A Pecha Kuchas is made up of 20 powerpoint slides timed to advance on the dot, and, generally speaking, one stressed-out presenter. Here’s a link to a pecha kucha I gave at IATEFL in Glasgow on ‘Learning to speak ‘merican.’ I think you have to log in to view it. http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/sessions/2012-03-22/pecha-kucha-part-1
By: Daniel Oines
I’m just back from my travels in time to celebrate Thanksgiving today and I have a lot to be grateful for. But being a Brit, of course I’m reluctant to gush my gratitude too much.
In fact one of the things found I needed to do when I moved to the US was stop saying ‘sorry’ so much and start saying ‘thank you’ more. It’s tied up with the different weightings we give to positive and negative politeness. I wouldn’t like to ‘do a Gwyneth’ for example. She was torn apart by the British Press for this oscar acceptance speech. (http://youtu.be/NG9p1FFwxb0)
I think Americans might have felt she went on rather long, but I doubt they would have described it as “blubbering”, “wailing” or “a sob-fest”, as the British press did. The Daily Mirror commented the next morning: ‘The Bard as ever summed it up: The lady doth protest too much, methinks’.
So could Brits ever have a Thanksgiving day, I wonder? Probably not. It’s not that we don’t like to count our blessings, but something more understated would probably work better. A “Mustn’t grumble day”, or a “Could be worse day” perhaps?
