HOW TO READ BETWEEN THE ENGLISH LINES

By Janet Daley, the Independent

There was a certain irony to all those shock-horror headlines over the Fayed affair. "Lies, lies, lies!" screamed the tabloids, to which anyone with an outside perspective on English social mores might have responded, "So, what's new?"

Duplicity is so embedded in the British way of life that for­eigners could perhaps be forgiven for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick about the acceptability of untruth. The deception which is freely practised is the sort that is designed to avoid un- kindness. But one person's tact is another's hypocrisy.

Social lies can be understood as the price of civilized life. The English obsession with avoiding the hurtful remark (even in its most indirect forms) is a trait for which I am always grateful, coming as I do from a country where compulsive truth-telling is developed to the point of sadism. But deception is a dangerous skill which has been cultivated as a recreation by the laid-back classes, whose ethos dominates national life.

Deliberately falsifying one's feelings and motives may be­come so ingrained a mannerism that sincerity becomes unrecog­nizable. True, one learns to allow for this in ordinary social ex­change — to understand that words, "How lovely to see you", however gushingly delivered, are not to be taken literally but are simply a polite reflex like the rhetorical question, "How do you do?"

But there is a terrible price paid for this Byzantine code of opaque communication. Duplicity is the great English disease (the Celts are mystified by it as foreigners), more debilitating than lethargy, with which it is often in league. It does offer some compensations, of course. It is generations of perfected duplicity which allow the English to produce the world's greatest actors (as well as some of its most notorious spies) and which gives a distinctive texture to its literature. As a novelist, I am constant­ly thankful for the fact that every English conversation has three levels of meaning: what you think, what you say and what you wish to be understood as saying. What we lose in the confusions of everyday life may to some extent be regained in the rich sub­tlety of ambiguous conversation.

The question is, how much lying is done to avoid unkindness (perhaps laudable) and how much to avoid unpleasantness (merely cowardly)? And how often does the cowardice become criminal­ly irresponsible, as in promising fulsome support to a colleague when you have no intention of voting his/her way at the meeting, or assuring an underling that he/ she is a valued employee when you are planning to sack him/her.

I offer an illustrative anecdote from the world I know best: Giles Mumblebotch, a chronically incompetent speaker, gives a guest lecture at Withit Polytechnic's trendy media department. His delivery is inaudible, his slides are in the wrong order and the content of his talk is mind-deadening. When he asks for ques­tions at the end, the students sit in stupefied silence.

Giles shuffles apologetically off the lecture platform to be greeted by beaming Alex Silk-Smooth, the head of department.

"Super, Giles", he murmurs fervently, "great talk".

Giles brightens. "Really?" he asks eagerly

"Spot on", affirms Alex, "just the sort of thing they need".

"But they didn't ask any questions", Giles says doubtfully.

"Oh, no, they never do", Alex burbles. "A shy lot, they are. We call them the Silent Generation".

Giles is glowing by now. "Well, if you think they'd be inter­ested — I've got a whole lecture series on graphic art of the late nineteenth century".

"Have you?' breathes Alex, as if all his birthdays had come at once. 'Well, well. We'll have to plan on that next term. Absolutely".

Alex will now spend the next three months avoiding Giles's persistent telephone calls, hoping that Mumblebotch will get the message that he is never going to be asked back to Withit Poly.

Not only will Giles be subjected to a humiliating run-around by the department secretary, but he will eventually come to real­ize how inept his pestering appeared. But, I can hear you say, surely Mumblebotch was naive to take Silksmooth's words as a serious undertaking. He was just being kind.

But if we must assume that even the most apparently honest exchange is, in fact, some kind of cipher which is not what it presents itself as being, then we really have passed through the looking glass into a realm where reality is difficult to grasp.

Many years ago, I was invited on to an advisory panel at a well-known architecture school. I attended the first meeting but at the time of the second was suffering from a heavy cold and so rang up to beg off.

Weeks went by and I was invited to no further meetings. I rang the supervising professor's office. Did he not wish me to continue on the panel? Oh. Yes, indeed he did. He had simply assumed that my pulling out of the second meeting meant that I 'wanted out'.

It would have been pointless to tell him that had I wanted out, I would have said so, that my quaint American standards of professionalism would have decreed that I write a letter of apol­ogy for such a decision. He would have been amazed and proba­bly offended.

If misunderstanding and failed communication become en­demic — as indeed they have in industrial relations — then even the simplest transactions will become entangled not only by mis­conception but by the more shaming fear that one will have been caught out in a gauche misjudgement. Not knowing how to read the signals is, after all, a dead giveaway of social inexperience.

Deceit is a game which you learn to play early in life — not to know its forms and rules marks you as an outsider. Or, in in­dustrial relations, as being from the Other Side which does not understand that this is a sport, at all.

PAIRWORK

Answer the following questions:

1. Where is Janet Daley from? What does she do?

2. Why does the author feel more comfortable when she speaks to an Englishman than when she speaks to an American?

3. Why does Janet Daley whose native language is English find her intentions misunderstood by English people at times?

4. What does the author understand by "social lies"? How does she differentiate between "lies" and "social lies"?

5. Is the attitude of the author to social lies negative or posi­tive? Give facts from the text to prove your point of view. What is your attitude to social lies?

6. What examples of misunderstanding and failed communica­tion does the author give? What do those examples serve to prove?

7. Who does Janet Daley hold responsible for English corrupt social mores? Do you agree with her? Why? / Why not?

8. What dangers may the duplicity of the English involve?

9. What advantages according to the author have the English as a nation gained through the constant practice of deception?

10. What might be the possible consequences of not knowing the rules of the game?

11. What does the author mean by referring to "industrial rela­tions" in the last two paragraphs of the article? Who is "the Other Side"?

12. What from your point of view may enable foreigners to over­come communication gaps that so many foreigners confront in dealing with the English?

13. Is the problem relevant to your native language?

Exercise 48

Find words corresponding to the following definitions.

1. customs, manners, social behaviour

2. deceit, hypocrisy, doubledealing

3. smth fixed firmly and deeply

4. morbid persistence of an idea in the mind, craze

5. the ethics, set of ideas, or beliefs of a person or a community

6. intentionally, on purpose

7. a peculiar way of behaving or speaking that has become a habit

8. to take into consideration

9. tending to make weak

10. clearly marking a person or thing as different from others

11. ingenuity, inventiveness

12. praiseworthy

13. greater than what is normal or necessary, insincere

14. fashionable

15. absurdly inappropriate, fatuous

16. annoy continually

17. natural, innate

18. clumsy, awkward, tactless

19. odd, unusual

Exercise 49

Give the meaning of the following phrases.

1. to get hold of the wrong end of the stick

2. compulsive truth-telling

3. the laid-back classes

4. the Byzantine code of opaque communication

5. in league with

6. fulsome support

7. to get the message

8. dead giveaway

Exercise 50

Find words in the text similar in meaning to those given below.

DUPLICITY, EMBEDDED, TRENDY

 

Exercise 51

Say which sentences in the text may be said to have been pat­terned on the following proverbs.

1. One man's meat is another man's poison.

2. What one loses on the swings one makes up/gains on the roundabouts.

Exercise 52

Write a summary of the article.

Exercise 53

 

Study the following idioms and make up sentences using them.

1. to split hairs — to make fine distinctions

The mother and child spent a great deal of time arguing about the hair-splitting question of whether "going to bed" meant lights out or not.

2. straight form the shoulder — in a direct, open way

I took the wind out of his sails by telling him straight from the shoulder what I thought of it.

3. to break the ice — to make a start by overcoming initial dif­ficulties, to overcome stiffness between strangers

All after-dinner speakers break the ice by telling a story or joke at the start of their speeches.

4. a pretty kettle of fish — a messy situation, a problem

He thought it was an innocent white lie, but it got him into a pretty kettle of fish.

Make up a situation using the idioms and the active vocabulary of the unit.

 

                READING PASSAGE ON LANGUAGE

The language spoken in each society is a reflection of its own particular culture. The type of language spoken by each in­dividual within a society is a symbol of his personality, back­ground and status. People, therefore, classify each other accord­ing to the way they speak, as is well illustrated in the following extracts from THE COLLECTOR by John Fowles. In this novel, a young man obsessed with a girl much higher up in the social scale, kidnaps and imprisons her. The first extract describes the thoughts of the man, Frederick, and the second those of the girl, Miranda.

Note that "D and Ms class" means "Daddy and Mummy s class" and that Caliban is Miranda's name for Frederick. In Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, Miranda is the cast-away hero­ine, Caliban the island s monster.

She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It's the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say. You only had to see her dainty ways tosee how she was brought up. She was not la-di-da, like many, but it was there all the same. You could see it when she got sarcastic and impatient with me because I could not explain my­self or I did things wrong. Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

I do not hold it against her, she probably said and did some of the shocking things she did to show me she was not really refined, but she was. When she was angry she could get right up on her high horse and come in over me with the best of them.

There was always class between us. What irritates me most about him is his way of speaking. Cliche after cliche after cliche, and all so old-fashioned, as if he has spent all his life with people over fifty. At lunch-time today he said, I called in with regard to those records they have placed on order. I said, Why don't you just say, "I asked about those records you ordered?" He said, I know my English isn't correct, but I try to make it correct. I didn't argue. That sums him up. He's got to be correct, he's got to do whatever was "right" and "nice" before either of us was born.

I know it's pathetic, I know he's a victim of a miserable Non­conformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the hor­rid timid copycatting genteel in-between class. I used to think D and M's class the worst. All golf and gin and bridge and cars and the right accent and the right money and having been to the right school and hating the arts. Well, that is foul. But Caliban's En­gland is fouler.

Choose the best option to complete the sentences below.

1) According to Frederick

a) He knew the girl was really a snob because she didn't fall for him.

b) It was the girl's accent that showed she was upper class.

c) His inability to express himself brought out the girl's class consciousness.

d) It is typical of the rich to tell you to stop thinking about class distinctions.

2) When the girl was angry

a) She really laid into speaker.

b) She made it plain he was her social inferior.

c) She ganged up with her social equals against him.

d) She would go off riding and leave him.

3) The girl objected to the man's remark about the records be­cause

a) It was unnecessarily complicated.

b) It was a cliche.

c) It was an old-fashioned remark.

d) It was grammatically correct.

4) The man's obsession with being "correct" sums him up in the girl's eyes because

a) It is the right thing to be.

b) It is a nice thing to be.

c) It is pathetic.

d) It is typical of his class.

5) The comparison with "D and M's class" shows that the girl

a) Regards speaking the right sort of language as a virtue.

b) Prefers the lower middle class to the upper middle.

c) Prefers the upper middle class to the lower middle.

d) Regards aping the middle class as worse than belonging to it.

Exercise 54

Can you complete these well-known proverbs?

1. Better to be safe than ...
2. Strike while the ...
3. It's always darkest before ...
4. You can take a horse to the water but...
5. Don't bite the hand that...
6. No news is ...
7. A miss is as good as ...
8. You can't teach an old dog new ...
9. If you lie down with dogs , you'll ...
10. Love all, trust...
11. The pen is mightier than the ...
12. An idle mind is ...
13. Where there's smoke there's ...
14. A penny saved is ...
15. Two's a company, three's ...
16. Don't put off till tomorrow what...
17. None are so blind as ...
18. Children should be seen and not...
19. When the blind leads the blind ...

Exercise 55

Fill in the appropriate word.

Learning to (1) _____a computer is not as difficult as many people think. Computers can be expensive to buy, but you can often get comprehensive packages containing all the equip­ment you need at a (2) _____from big companies. Some companies will even (3) _____the system for you. Your system will also include various kinds of (4) _____ such as

word-processing and game programmes, all stored on disks. When you put the disk into the computer, the programme or informa­tion can be displayed on the (5) _____. Many computer (6) _____go on the Internet. This is a system that links computers, making it possible to (7) _____information from one system to another in a different place (8) _____the telephone. This can (9), _____ problems, because addicts who use their computers all the time can (10) _____ the phone circuits, meaning that other people cannot make (11) _____ tele phone calls.

► WRITING

Exercise 56

Write paragraphs to comment on the following quotations.

1. English usage is sometimes more than a mere taste, judg­ment, and education — sometimes it's sheer luck, like get­ting across a street.

                                      E. B. White

1. Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

                           Carl Sandburg

1. I am always sorry when any language is lost, because lan­guages are the pedigree of nations.

Samuel Johnson

Exercise 57

Write an essay on one of the following subjects.

1. Accent is one of the biggest barriers to social equality in Britain.

2. Much unhappiness has come into the world because of be­wilderment and things left unsaid.

F. Dostoyevsky

3. Language is the archives of history. Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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