Watching the English

BORING BUT IMPORTANT

This book is not written for other social scientists, but rather for that elusive creature publishers used to call 'the intelligent layman'. My non-academic approach cannot, however, be used as a convenient excuse for woolly thinking, sloppy use of language, or failing to define my terms. This is a book about the 'rules' of Englishness, and I cannot simply assert that we all know what we mean by a 'rule', without attempting to explain the sense or senses in which I am using the term.

I am using a rather broad interpretation of the concept of a rule, based on four of the definitions allowed by the Oxford English Dictionary, namely:

* a principle, regulation or maxim governing individual conduct;

* a standard of discrimination or estimation; a criterion, a test, a measure;

* an exemplary person or thing; a guiding example;

* a fact, or the statement of a fact, which holds generally good; the normal or usual state of things.

Thus, my quest to identify the rules of Englishness is not confined to a search for specific rules of conduct, but will include rules in the wider sense of standards, norms, ideals, guiding principles and 'facts' about 'normal or usual' English behaviour.

This last is the sense of 'rule' we are using when we say: 'As a rule, the English tend to be X (or prefer Y, or dislike Z).' When we use the term rule in this way, we do not mean - and this is important - that all English people always or invariably exhibit the characteristic in question, only that it is a quality or behaviour pattern which is common enough, or marked enough, to be noticeable and significant. Indeed, it is a fundamental requirement of a social rule - by whatever definition - that it can be broken. Rules of conduct (or standards, or principles) of this kind are not like scientific or mathematical laws, statements of a necessary state of affairs; they are by definition contingent. If it were, for example, utterly inconceivable and impossible that anyone would ever jump a queue, there would be no need for a rule prohibiting queue jumping.3

When I speak of the unwritten rules of Englishness, therefore, I am clearly not suggesting that such rules are universally obeyed in English society, or that no exceptions or deviations will be found. That would be ludicrous. My claim is only that these rules are 'normal and usual' enough to be helpful in understanding and defining our national character.

Often, exceptions and deviations may help to 'prove' (in the correct sense of 'test') a rule, in that the degree of surprise or outrage provoked by the deviation provides an indication of its importance, and the 'normality' of the behaviour it prescribes. Many of the pundits conducting premature post-mortems on Englishness make the fundamental mistake of citing breaches of the traditional rules of Englishness (such as, say, the unsportsmanlike behaviour of a footballer or cricketer) as evidence for their diagnosis of death, while ignoring public reaction to such breaches, which clearly shows that they are regarded as abnormal, unacceptable and un-English.