"English taboos"

English taboos

Taboos in the UK

• Do not rest your elbows on the table.
• Do not stare.
• Do not be overly familiar with people you do not know well.
• Do not ask personal questions such as how much someone earns, who they voted for etc.
• Do not speak too loudly or cut into a conversation.
• If you go shopping in the UK, one of the first taboos you may notice is a British aversion to bargaining.
• British people don't like to talk about salary or age.
• The British have the habit of queuing. Jumping the queue is not looked upon kindly in the UK, so make sure to wait your turn.

Cheating’ is the worst sin

‘ Cheating’ is the worst sin - a violation of the all-important fair-play ethos - but even admitting to having a game-plan, ‘playing to win’, is taboo. Restraint, inhibition, reserve, shyness, embarrassment, indirectness, hypocrisy, gritted-teeth politeness - all very English, and, you might say, not particularly surprising.

Umbrella for higher and lower class males

• Men are somewhat more likely to carry umbrellas only in cities - there is an old unwritten taboo against gentlemen carrying an umbrella in the country, except at the races or other occasions where chivalry might require them to protect dressed up ladies from the rain. So, an umbrella in the city can sometimes be a higher-class signal, but an umbrella on a country walk is lower class.

finger bowls

• Tales are often told of ignorant lower-class guests drinking from finger bowls - and of ultra-polite hosts then drinking from the bowls themselves, so as not to embarrass the guests by drawing attention to their error. You are supposed to dip your fingers briefly in the finger bowl, then pat them gently dry with your napkin - not wash and scrub and rub as though it were a bathroom sink, unless you want to activate your hosts’ class-radar systems.

New-Year’s-Eve

• mooning but not flashing
• fighting but not queue-jumping
• bawdy jokes but not racist ones
• ‘ illicit’ flirting and, in some circles, snogging, but not adulterous sex
• promiscuity but not, if you are straight, homosexuality
• nor heterosexual lapses if you are gay
• vomiting and (if male) urinating in the street but never defecating; and so on.

The taboo on earnestness

• It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realize that when the English say ‘Oh really? How interesting!’ they might well mean ‘I don’t believe a word of it, you lying toad’. O r they might not. They might just mean ‘I’m bored and not really listening but trying to be polite’. Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested. You’ll never know.

what you do not eat

• ‘ I’ve stopped giving dinner parties,’ one upper middle-class journalist told me. ‘It’s become simply impossible. Catering for the odd vegetarian was OK, but now everyone’s got a wheat allergy or a dairy intolerance or they’re vegan or macrobiotic or Atkins or they can’t eat eggs or they’ve got ‘issues’ about salt or they’re paranoid about e-numbers or they’ll only eat organic or they’re de-toxing

the taboo on ‘prying’

• the distance rule. The more ‘distant’ from you the subject of gossip, the wider the circle of people with whom you may gossip about that person.
• If, for example, you want to find out about an English person’s attitudes and feelings on a sensitive subject, such as, say, marriage, you do not ask about his or her own marriage - you talk about someone else’s marriage, preferably that of a remote public figure not personally known to either of you.

goodbye to each other

• Those leaving are desperate to get away, and those hovering in the doorway are dying to shut the door on them, but it would be impolite to give any hint of such feelings, so everyone must make a great show of being reluctant to part. Even when the final, final, final goodbyes have been said, and everyone is loaded into the car, a window is often wound down to allow a few more parting words. When the long-goodbye or deal is over, we all heave an exhausted sigh of relief.

the sordid subject of money’

• You will not often see an English person entirely at ease when obliged to engage in money talk, Some may appear brash and bullish, but this is often as much a symptom of disease as the nervous joking or pologetic manner.

No tears

• THE ENGLISH England is possibly the only culture in the world in which no tears at all is entirely normal and acceptable. Most adult English males do not cry publicly at funerals; if their eyes do start to fill, they will usually brush the wetness away with a quick, angry gesture and ‘pull themselves together’.
• Tears are permitted; a bit of quiet, unobtrusive sobbing and sniffing is acceptable, but the sort of anguished howling that is considered normal, and indeed expected, at funerals in many other cultures, would here be regarded as undignified and inappropriate.

To conclude..

• Most things look rather different when you put them under a microscope, and sure enough, I found that stereotypes such as English ‘reserve’, ‘politeness’, ‘weather-talk’, ‘hypocrisy’, ‘privacy’ and so on were not quite what they seemed - and they all had complex layers of rules and codes that were not visible to the naked eye.