How to be a Brit

bad
manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own
personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a
self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a
different opinion.
    A continental gentleman
seeing a nice panorama may remark:
    ‘This view rather reminds
me of Utrecht, where the peace treaty concluding the War of Spanish Succession
was signed on the 11th April, 1713. The river there, however, recalls the
Guadalquivir, which rises in the Sierra de Cazorla and flows south-west to the
Atlantic Ocean and is 650 kilometres long. Oh, rivers… What did Pascal say
about them? “Les rivières sont les chemins qui marchent...
    This pompous, showing-off
way of speaking is not permissible in England. The Englishman is modest and
simple. He uses but few words and expresses so much — but so much — with them.
An Englishman looking at the same view would remain silent for two or three
hours and think about how to put his profound feeling into words. Then he would
remark:
    ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’
    An English professor of
mathematics would say to his maid checking up the shopping list:
    ‘I’m no good at arithmetic,
I’m afraid. Please correct me, Jane, if I am wrong, but I believe that the
square root of 97344 is 312.’
    And about knowledge. An
English girl, of course, would be able to learn just a little more about, let
us say, geography. But it is just not ‘chic’ to know whether Budapest is the
capital of Roumania, Hungary or Bulgaria. And if she happens to know that
Budapest is the capital of Roumania, she should at least be perplexed if
Bucharest is mentioned suddenly.
    It is so much nicer to ask,
when someone speaks of Barbados, Banska Bystrica or Fiji:
    ‘Oh those little
islands.... Are they British?’
    (They usually are.)

HOW TO BE RUDE
     
    It is easy to be
rude on the Continent. You just shout and call people names of a zoological
character.
    On a slightly higher level
you may invent a few stories against your opponents. In Budapest, for instance,
when a rather unpleasant-looking actress joined a nudist club, her younger and
prettier colleagues spread the story that she had been accepted only under the
condition that she should wear a fig-leaf on her face. Or in the same city
there was a painter of limited abilities who was a most successful card-player.
A colleague of his remarked once: ‘What a spendthrift I All the money he makes
on industrious gambling at night, he spends on his painting during the day.’
    In England rudeness has
quite a different technique. If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story,
on the Continent you would remark ‘You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one
at that.’ In England you just say ‘Oh, is that so?’ Or ‘That’s rather an
unusual story, isn’t it?’
    When some years ago, knowing
ten words of English and using them all wrong, I applied for a translator’s
job, my would-be employer (or would-be-not-employer) softly remarked: ‘I am
afraid your English is somewhat unorthodox.’ This translated into any
continental language would mean: employer (to the commissionaire): ‘Jean, kick this gentleman down the steps!‘
    In the last century, when a
wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia,
he had his head cut of without much ceremony; but when the same happened in
England, the monarch declared: ‘We are not amused’; and the whole British
nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen
was.
    Terribly rude expressions
(if pronounced grimly) are: ‘I am afraid that…’ ’unless...’ ‘nevertheless…’
‘How queer...’ and ‘I am sorry, but…’
    It is true that quite often
you can hear remarks like: ‘You’d better see that you get out of here!‘ Or
‘Shut your big mouth!‘ Or ‘Dirty pig!‘ etc. These remarks are very un-English
and are the results of foreign influence. (Dating back, however, to the era of
the Danish invasion.)



HOW TO COMPROMISE
     
    Wise compromise is
one of the basic principles and virtues of the British.
    If a continental
greengrocer asks 14 schillings (or crowns, or francs, or pengoes, or dinars or
leis or δραχμαί or лева , or whatever you like) for a bunch of
radishes, and his customer offers 2, and finally they strike a bargain agreeing
on 6 schillings, francs, roubles, etc., this is just the low continental habit
of bargaining; on the other hand,