Top Quotes: “Understanding the British: A hilarious guide from Apologising to Wimbledon” — Adam Fletcher
“Everyone professes to love the NHS, few would dare criticise it, yet everyone elects to go private at the first chance.”
“Your minor party is totally irrelevant unless it threatens to break the balance of power between Labour and Conservative. It just so happened that many UKIP supporters were former Conservative voters. A problem that threatened to tip 2015's general election in Labour’s favour.
So Prime Minister and Supertoff David Cameron offered a deal. If the Conservatives were re-elected, there would be a referendum on EU membership.
It was the sort of deal that Donald Trump would describe in a poorly punctuated late-night tweet sent from the Whitehouse bath as “an unbelievably shitty deal. Bad. Sad!” It was a political cock-block of UKIP, nothing more.
But with it, Supertoff took what was a marginal issue, something 10 to 15 percent of the population cared about, and made it something the whole nation would be asked to inform themselves about and then vote on.
The Conservatives got re-elected. In 2016, we had that referendum.”
“They didn’t have to show policies, projections, timetables, and other such evidence of planning and rationality. The few claims they did make – most famously, “8350 million a week for the NHS” – were promptly abandoned after the result. “Our promises were a series of possibilities,” said Leave politician Ian Duncan Smith, to the relief of anyone who has ever made a wedding vow.
As a result, the Vote Leave campaign was, as put by one academic, “one of the most dishonest political campaigns this country has ever seen”. The Electoral Commission investigated and concluded it also broke electoral funding laws. It fined them sixty-one thousand pounds and referred two of its members to the police for prosecution.”
“There is only one acceptable response to the question “How are you?” That answer is “Finethanksandyou?” (must be spoken as one word).”
“There’s something called received pronunciation (RP). It’s the English that the Queen and our political class speak. Margaret Thatcher took elocution lessons just to be able to express all the awful things she wanted to do to our society in RP.
Almost no one speaks it. It’s like the Atlantis of British accents.
However, thanks to the BBC World Service, Hugh Grant romcoms, study-English CDs, and Monty Python, it has become the default accent deluded foreign types expect us to have.”
“The average Brit speaks English as if shes talking through a muddy shoe.
We take pride in speaking a bastard gutter-ghetto English, a messy swamp of slang and idioms and sticky swear words and lazy, lumpy pronunciation. Nouns end at the midway point. Glottal stops turn water into wolltah. Words change meaning. In Liverpool, la is a friend, everywhere else it’s a musical note. In the Midlands, mash is something you can do to tea, not just potatoes. In London, Apples and pears mean stairs?! In We’ve a new and equally incomprehensible dialect every seven miles.
We use miles. I mean, come on! It’s chaos.
It’s only when I moved to Germany that I realised how bad I was at the only language I knew how to speak. It was quite a shock. I was one of only two native English speakers in the company, so other departments would send me English texts for correction. That lasted two weeks, until they noticed I had no idea how the English language worked. I sent their creations back with more mistakes than they’d had when I received them. They began sending the texts to the Scandinavian team instead. They spoke such lovely English, after all.”
“British Airways flight BA 009 is thirty-seven-thousand feet over the Indian Ocean when all four. of its engines fail, due to an ash cloud from a nearby volcano. The plane tilts and begins an unexpected descent. Oxygen masks drop down onto terrified passengers’ heads. The pilot is a Brit named Eric Moody, who is anything but, and he uses the plane’s public-address system to say the following:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
Eric Moody, like so many of my people, is a fan of understatement and euphemism. You may have noticed that the British don’t state — we understate. Or, if possible, under-understate. If even that feels too confrontational, we’ll err further on the side of caution by prefacing with a whole bunch of sweet-sounding words that, upon reflection, say nothing at all.”
“A powerful weapon in the British dark art of euphemism and conversational subterfuge is called litotes. It’s when, to avoid being too linguistically assertive when appraising something — a person’s hat, a new type of strawberry yoghurt, communism — you adopt the opposite position but soften it with a not.
Good becomes not bad
Bad becomes not terrible
I like it becomes it does not displease me
Using litotes is not exactly brain surgery (it’s trivial), even for not the sharpest tools in the shed (stupid people), and while it’s perhaps not our favourite linguistic tool (it’s average), and not without its problems (it’s problematic), all in all, its use is not too shabby indeed (it’s great).”
“While we strongly favour understatement, there are specific situations in which we take off our personality strait jackets and go positively praise crazy. Situations where overstatement is encouraged. These are exciting opportunities to release any pent-up life enthusiasm. Don’t waste them.
The situations are specific, however. They come about when discussing the following:
- The previous night’s alcohol consumption.
Don’t say: “I was drunk.”
Say: “I was absolutely smashed, completely shitfaced, off my tits. I had no idea what was going on. It was totally epic. I think. I don’t remember. Did I mention that? I woke up in a bin. Not my bin, either.”
3. People who displease you
Don’t say: “She’s just not my type.” Or, “I don’t like him.”
Say: “She fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.” Or, “Someone not quite as educated as I am might go as far as to call him a f******”
4. How hungry/thirsty you are
Don’t say: “I’m a little peckish.” Or, “I guess liquid refreshment could be nice.”
Say: “I’m gagging for a drink.” Or, “I’m absolutely dying of thirst.” Or, “I’m hungry enough to eat a horse and then run after the jockey.”
5. How cute something is
Don’t say: “The dog is smaller than normal in a way that pleases.”
Say: “OMG that dog is soooo adorable I want to eat him with a spoon. Here, boy. Here, boy. AHHHHHH bless him. I’m in love.”
6. Job titles
Don’t say: “deliver the post.”
Say: “I’m Vice-President of Regional Correspondence Distribution Coordinator Executive Supervisor.”
7. When swearing
Don’t say: “This carbonara is a bit shit.”
Say: “It’s absolute wank.” Or, “It’s utter shite with shite on top and a side of shitsticks.” Or, “Never before have I had a carbonara this piss-bloody poor.”
“Imagine you enter a room to find a stressed friend doing a very bad job assembling IKEA furniture. To make fun of him, which is your civic duty, you could choose from the following:
A) Self-deprecation (making yourself the butt of the joke): “And I always thought I had two left thumbs.”
B) Sarcasm (using irony to convey contempt): “I can’t work out if you need help with it or it needs help with you.”
C) Misdirection (swerve your sentence unexpectedly into a wall); “Do you need help disassembling it?”
D) Exaggeration (like, easily the most amazing form!): “How does it feel to always be the most incompetent person in a room?”
E) Puns (rely on homonyms words with multiple meanings): “I haven’t seen screwing this inept since I was a teenager.””
“Say John notices his friend Bill always shirks his round duties, is ever reluctant to put his hand in his wallet. John has a conundrum. He could confront Bill directly. But that would be risky, might be perceived as rude, confrontational. Bill might get offended. Yet, John doesn’t want to keep paying for skinflint Bill.
The solution? Humour.
John can use jokes to subtly (or not so subtly) tell Bill to correct his behaviour. John makes sure there are some friends around to hear, and then he teases Bill about how “his wallet must have cobwebs”. The group laughs and joins in. One friend quips, “It’s ironic he’s called Bill.” They give him the nickname “Doesn’t Get The”.
Now, of course, the group does this in a loving, banterous way. With their eyes, their tone, their warm smiles, they’re saying, We like you, Bill. You’re one of us.
Yet behind those funny, innocent-sounding words, there’s a coded threat: Sure, Bill, but for how long?”
“Thanks to their nutritious online presence, I now know that there are 8500 fish and chip shops in the UK, eight for every McDonald’s. I know that 10 percent of the nation’s potato crop is used (some might say squandered) by them. That the fish and chip industry is worth 1.2 billion pounds a year to our economy. That 22 percent of the nation visits a fish and chip shop at least once a week. That they are our most popular takeaway. Now you know those things, too. They are irrefutable evidence that this is one of those stereotypes that’s true.
We love fish and chips.”
“They delight in telling you that there are only two countries in the world where the top-selling drink isn’t Coca-Cola; Scotland is one of them, and Ir-Bru is that drink. It’s liquid defiance, fizzy independence, orange originality.”
“I don’t think Im-Bru relieves the dull aches of excess but does succeed in confusing the body with a sharp attack of syrupy distraction. It simply WTFs it. The body goes from being mad at you to being too confused to form any strong conclusions right now.”
“You don’t have to travel far in Britain to realise we’ve been driven round the bend by round-abouts. We’ve twenty-five thousand of the damn things. The highest proportion of roundabouts to road anywhere in the world. We even have a society called The Roundabout Appreciation Society, where enthusiasts of these mid-road pancakes can meet and
discuss .. I have no idea.
“Traffic lights are so fascist and dictatorial, telling you when to stop and go,” their leader, Kevin Beresford, told the Guardian. Damn right, Kevin — you stick it to those blinking Mussolinis. The organisation’s yearly calendar, which contains spectacular full-colour imagery of twelve roundabouts in Redditch, sold one hundred thousand copies worldwide. Although I’m going to guess 99 percent ended up within our shores.”
“We’re so into roundabouts, in fact, that we even have one in Swindon that is five mini-roundabouts inside a giant sixth roundabout crust. It’s called The Magic Roundabout, presumably because people who make it through without crashing assume something supernatural has happened. Some of our roundabouts are so big and complex they even have traffic lights – the thing they were supposed to supersede – within them. As logical as putting stairs inside a lift.
We’re so crazy about our roundabouts that we’ve even built an entire city in their homage: Milton Keynes. The Internet – always a bastion of truth--informs me Milton Keynes has one hundred and thirty such circular intersections.”
