For years, I assumed that every English person I heard speaking was incredibly intelligent. Then one day I realized it was just that English people speak with English accents and it's not the same thing. Case in point, Tony Blair, who helpfully explains that the plan to use Iraq as the first stop in a broader campaign of regional transformation would have gone swimmingly if not for the fact that . . . some people fought back.
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The Truth About the English
18 May 2007 06:15 pm
Comments (40)
I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people -- whom we've spent years describing as the embodiment of pure evil -- would fight back.
Sure, maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the government, but no one in our circles.
these people -- whom we've spent years describing as the embodiment of pure evil
You mean the British? Yeah, we Americans did consider them the embodiment of evil, until Woodrow Wilson tricked us into changing sides.
Funny -- I guess great (or not so great) minds think alike. My response to hearing Tony Blair (on NPR) prattling on about Britishness was to imagine him saying
well, people of all races, cultures and creeds can and are successfully integrated into British society. You see, Britishness is not about having pasty-white skin or being Anglican or even about having bad teeth. The essence of Britishness is that, if you display a modicum of wit and speak in one of our charming accents, people 'round the world ... or at least in America, as those are the people who count ... will say "by golly, that's a smart person -- after all, s/he's speaking in such a polished, British accent" -- after all, look at how far it's got me to speak with a British accent.
Merry Shabbos and Happy Birthday!
Tony Blair is smart. His over-optimism about Iraq resulted from his positive experiences dropping the hammer on odious dictators in the Balkans and Sierre Leone.
Nevertheless, the invasion of Iraq did shake the status quo in the region, and could still end up changing the region for the better. A lot of that depends on the folks in the region, of course. The Kurds have certainly taken advantage of the absence of Saddam Hussein; the Shiites have less experience running their own affairs, but we'll see what they do. And if the Shiites can improve their lot in Iraq, it may inspire the Shiites in places like Saudi Arabia.
The invasion of Iraq is the biggest external shock to the Arab world since the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. It will take a decade or more to see how Blair's predictions about regional transformation fare.
I remember in college watching very, very good chess players sit down against rank amatuers. The tyro would make moves totally unexpected and utterly devoid of proper strategy. Sometimes they'd even win through some fluke or the resulting exasperated poor play of the expert. I think Iraq is similar. Our opponents aren't playing by rules we like or know very well. And sometimes they kick our ass.
spending time in england also disabuses you of any notion that an "english" accent is a signifier of great intelligence, although as a general rule, i would say that thanks to question time in the house, british cabinet officers and PMs are more spontaneously articulate than their american counterparts.
In the abstract, it's the same error as voting for someone for POTUS simply because you'd rather have a beer with them.
Fuck Americans are stupid.
More humorously, I recall Kurt Baier telling us a long time ago a small joke/anecdote about the pronunciation of "Kant":
Those who know a little bit about him say "Kant", those who know a good bit say "Kant", and those who know a LOT say "Kant".
Hm. Doesn't come through so well in writing.
Fuck you're stupid.
"I remember in college watching very, very good chess players sit down against rank amatuers. The tyro would make moves totally unexpected and utterly devoid of proper strategy. Sometimes they'd even win through some fluke or the resulting exasperated poor play of the expert. I think Iraq is similar. Our opponents aren't playing by rules we like or know very well. And sometimes they kick our ass."
For a second I thought you were talking about Bush, Blair, and the neocons against, well, anyone in the US and UK government who understood something about foreign policy.
It's the British spelling in blog comments which is the true sign of intelligence.
You mean, blogue comments, of course.
For years, I assumed that every English person I heard speaking was incredibly intelligent.
Robin Leach didn't give the game away?
Well, it's not quite the accents: there are plenty of English accents that are considered dumb. It's just rare that those accents. And most British pols develop their verbal capacity either through their pre-pol jobs (many are barristers) or in Parliament. In an environment without 30-second TV spots at election time, you don't get far without some articulacy.
Blair's verbal tics -- especially his code-switching, his 'well, y'knows', and his love of verbless sentences -- have long been the subject of mockery from British sketch writers in the national papers. It's just that Americans don't get the full exposure.
It'll be interesting to see how Americans perceive Gordon Brown, who's a Scot. I wouldn't be surprised to see subtitles on the evening news, to be frank.
Oops: it's just rare that those (dumb-sounding) British accents make it to American ears.
You never saw Oasis give an interview back in the day?
On a related note... while growing up in the 1980s on a steady diet of MTV, I assumed that all the men in England wore mascara and had their hair cut by poodle groomers.
But then I saw a movie about football hooligans and gained an appreciation for the cultural diversity of the British Isles.
But British spelling in online porn is just silly. Especially all that stuff about knickers and arses.
How great would it be if we had something like that Question Day they have in Britain here? Anyone watch that on CSPAN? All those MPs sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the green leather padded bench, and one after another they ask the PM a question. Then he gets up in front of some gigantic open book and spontaneously responds to the "right honorable gentlemen".
Matt Yglesias: completely off-topic, but did you see the dialog from Slate (via Steve Sailer) about whether or not it's appropriate for white Americans to root for the 6% minority of white American NBA players? Your thoughts?
LOL.
For years, I assumed that every English person I heard speaking was incredibly intelligent
Wow, you must have been really confused the first time you watched "Spinal Tap".
Watching British schoolkids refuse to eat anything but deep-fried mechanically separated chicken parts on Jamie Oliver's show pretty much killed the myth of British superiority for me. That, and the aforementioned interviews with Oasis, and the increasing exposure of chav culture in general.
In Tony Blair's defense, he always held his own during prime minister's questions, both before and after he was prime minister. (Good god--I can't believe I was watching pm's questions since before he was the pm. I can't be that old.) It's just that now he's forced to defend the indefensible.
I work with a very smart English guy who's got one of the "dumb English" accents. It's pretty cool.
How great would it be if we had something like that Question Day they have in Britain here?
Bush wouldn't last a minute -
but by all means: go for it!
"It'll be interesting to see how Americans perceive Gordon Brown, who's a Scot."
As is Tony Blair of course.
I''ll take Georgia hillbilly over Cockney every time.
Hell, I'll even take Shrub's fake Texas twang.
The English are a bit more intelligent than Americans overall because they esteem their own language more hightly than we do. If you can't articulate a thought reasonably clearly - if not elegantly - do you even know what it is you're thinking? Very often, no.
BTW, GW Bush is reasonably (sometimes terribly) articulate when he knows what he's talking about (politics).
American-English is one of the most versatile languages on the planet. We speak it just fine, what you don't seem to like is that we don't speak the same exact language as they do in England. That's normal for a country that has had vastly different influences for the past 400 years.
I am not denigrating American English relative to English English. I'm saying we don't care about language itself as much here in the 'States.
Perhaps you're referring to our extremely liberal alterations to the way we apply syntax?
I'll adjudicate as a Canadian. Brits in general are better with the language for the same reason Americans are better with guns: they spend more time thinking about it, learning about it, arguing about it, and applying it creatively to do violence.
But while this often leads to more coherent thoughts, it can also stifle more creative ones.
"I work with a very smart English guy who's got one of the "dumb English" accents. It's pretty cool."
It's not cool if he didn't grow up with it. Rich kids of any nationality who adopt fake working-class accents and attitudes are really, really obnoxious.
Fortunately, this behavior--huge in the 1990s--seems to be on a downward trend. (For a musico-sociological analysis, I refer the reader to the album "Different Class," by the band Pulp.)
Brits in general are better with the language for the same reason Americans are better with guns: they spend more time thinking about it, learning about it, arguing about it, and applying it creatively to do violence.
Exactly. Very well said, nolaboyd. I'm also arguing that more facility with more/less standard language does promote overall intelligence. Americans may seem to have a flair for creative deviation from the norm, but that is often born more of necessity than choice: if your cultural memory of what the 'norm' (standard) actually is fades as quickly as it is doing here in the US, your language becomes more pidgeon ('pidgen') than full-fledged alternative. Pidgen language can be charming, and you can certainly get your point across with it most of the time, but it isn't the same thing as the English of Shakes or George Elliot - or Mellville or Twain.
You often hear people here in the US say they 'know what they mean, but can't put it into words'. There are cases in which that's defensible - Einstein's vision of Relativity comes to mind. But much more often, if you don't have the words, you really *don't* know what you mean.
It's not cool if he didn't grow up with it. Rich kids of any nationality who adopt fake working-class accents and attitudes are really, really obnoxious.
This reminds me how my brother, who grew up with me in the whitest of white suburbs in northern New Jersey, decided one day to start punctuating all of his sentences with "yo." It's not just obnoxious. It's really, really annoying. Or, as I put it, quoting from a Time Magazine column at the time, "trying to cloak your adolescent rebellion with a veneer of ghetto toughness." That sounded much more amusing when it was coming out of the mouth of my 16-year-old suburban self.
As is Tony Blair of course.
Have sympathy, Tim: the Scots really don't like to admit it. And Fettes is much more 'North Briton' in character.
It's not cool if he didn't grow up with it. Rich kids of any nationality who adopt fake working-class accents and attitudes are really, really obnoxious.
Rich != smart, even if it's easier to be smart in the US if you're rich. Point taken, though.
Wow, you must have been really confused the first time you watched "Spinal Tap".
It's even more confusing when you realise that the actors are Americans doing decent 'sarf Lahndahn' accents, and that one of them is the 5th Baron Haden-Guest of Saling in the county of Essex.
...they spend more time thinking about it, learning about it, arguing about it, and applying it creatively to do violence.
This brings to mind something I once came across, that the British tend to like people who they'd call "clever." Clever can mean a lot of things, and probably some subset of those things would involve, what we would call here in the States, "being an asshole."
The British generally have a better command of the language. As with all generalizations there's a lot of variability in there. The whole Bush/Blair contrast has become the archetype for a lot of us Americans of the superior eloquence and articulateness of the British. Both figures are equally divorced from reality, but one glosses it in a thicker veneer of verbal intelligence. British journalism definitely seems more intelligent than its American counter-part--the good end of it at least, I'm not talking about the tabloid fluff. I'll take the Independent, Guardian and BBC over the NYT and our network news.
Arrested Development did this bit, with the character played by Charlize Theron whom no one realized had the mind of a fourth grader because her accent sounded so intelligent.
Except that Theron's accent was really not very good. Though that was (arguably) deliberate gag on American stereotypes, since her uncle Trevor was played by a Canadian.
Clever can mean a lot of things, and probably some subset of those things would involve, what we would call here in the States, "being an asshole."
For which, see Sarah Vowell's 'The Nerd Voice' (in The Partly Cloudy Patriot) where she quotes a Buffy writer on why Giles (and Wesley) had to be British for the characters to work:
"The Brits don't apologize for being knowledgeable. In fact, they're a little disdainful of you for not doing your homework. And in America, doing your homework is the most uncool thing in the world..."
The day Tony Blair was first elected in 1997, a Scottish friend of mine said to me, "I dinnae trust a Scotsman who pretends he's no' a Scotsman".
True wisdom indeed.
Comments closed June 01, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It's the British spelling in blog comments which is the true sign of intelligence.
Posted by otto | May 18, 2007 6:41 PM