Watching the English

GROOMING-TALK RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

The weather-speak rules have already given us some clues about the 'grammar' of Englishness, and the grooming-talk rules can now help us to identify a few more of the defining characteristics we are seeking.

The rules of introduction confirm the weather-speaking findings on problems of reserve and social inhibition, and show that without 'facilitators', we are quite unable to overcome these difficulties. A tendency to awkwardness, embarrassment and general social ineptitude must now be incorporated into our 'grammar' - an important factor, as this tendency must surely have a significant effect on all aspects of English social relations.

The no-name rule highlights an English preoccupation with privacy, and a somewhat unsociable, suspicious, standoffishness. This rule has also given us the first hint of the convoluted, irrational, Looking-Glass nature of English etiquette. The 'Pleased to meet you' problem provides our first evidence of the way in which class-consciousness pervades every aspect of English life and culture, but also exposes our reluctance to acknowledge this issue.

The gossip rules bring to light a number of important characteristics, the most striking of which is, again, the English obsession with privacy - also emphasized by the guessing-game rule, the distance rule, and the 'exception that proves the rule' of the print media. The sex differences in gossip rules remind us that, in any culture, what is sauce for the goose is not always sauce for the gander. This sounds like a rather obvious point, but it is one that was often ignored by early anthropologists, and is sometimes glossed over by those who comment on Englishness today: both have a tendency to assume that 'male' rules are 'the' rules. Anyone who believes, for example, that the English are not very excitable or animated in their everyday speech, has clearly never listened to two English females gossiping. The normal rules of restraint and reserve, in this case, apply only to gossiping males.

The rules of male and female bonding-talk reinforce the goose-and-gander point, but beneath striking (potentially dazzling) surface differences, they turn out to have critical features in common, including prohibition of boasting, prescription of humour and abhorrence of 'earnestness', polite hypocrisy and the triumph of etiquette over reason.

Finally, the long goodbye rule highlights (again) the importance of embarrassment and ineptitude in English social interactions - our apparently congenital inability to handle simple matters such as greeting and parting with any consistency or elegance - but also provides a remarkable example of the irrational excesses of English politeness.

13. To be fair, I should point out that although 'How do you do?' is technically a question, and written as such, it is spoken as a statement - with no rising, interrogative intonation at the end - so the custom of repeating it back is not quite as absurd as it might seem (almost, but not quite).

14. And this was research conducted in a manner of which I approve, not by questionnaire or lab experiments, but by eavesdropping on real conversations in natural settings, so we can have some confidence in these findings.

15. There are of course other theories of language evolution, the most appealing of which is Geoffrey Miller's proposition that language evolved as a courtship device - to enable us to flirt. Fortunately, the 'chat-up' theory of language evolution is not incompatible with the 'gossip' theory, providing one accepts that gossip has multiple functions, including status-display for courtship purposes.

16. Including Professor Robin Dunbar's team, and my own SIRC project studying gossip on mobile phones.

17. Perhaps not surprisingly, some children rebel against this: teenagers in particular may go through a phase of refusing to participate in this ritual and, often, provoking their elders by going to the opposite extreme, where leave-takings consist of shouting 'see ya' and slamming the door. There does not seem to be a happy medium.