Aunty Em
Well-Known Member
With a new scanner comes new OCR software.... An interesting article I read in todays newspaper. How true do you think this opinion is?
Why Americans and Brits will always remain worlds apart.
Mark Palmer
Daily Express
18/4/03
These days the United States and Britain are standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Our shoulders have been glued together ever since the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers 18 months ago, with the Prime Minister desperate to show that Britain is America’s closest ally and with the US president responding in kind - despite an obvious reluctance on his part to spend much time on this side of the Atlantic.
We stood shoulder-to-shoulder during the routing of the Taliban in Afghanistan and during the battle to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Before that, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were joined at the hip in their efforts to establish a peace in Northern Ireland and during the Eighties Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher enjoyed a “special relationship” that was regarded as crucial to the eventual dismantling of the Iron Curtain and demise of communism.
Despite all this cosiness and efforts of our politicians to bring us closer together, when it comes to what really matters Britain and America remain as distant from each other as we ever have been. And, most Brits and Yanks would add, long may it remain so.
Our political masters may be great buddies, we may speak the same language - albeit with a radically altered vocabulary - and we may share many of the same TV programmes but we are races apart. They come here and feel lost. We go there and shake our heads in disbelief at how such a big country can be so small-minded. The cultural and social differences between us are massive and getting bigger as Americans increasingly refuse to travel, increasingly refuse to learn about other nations and increasingly prefer to assume that, simply - America equals the world.
So, it was no great surprise that The Economist this week found it necessary to publish a guide to Britain, to be distributed to 75,000 high-profile world travellers. “The British are less politically correct than American counterparts,” says the guide. “Wittiness often means an agility with sexual innuendo, with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The line between work and private life is not as clearly delineated as in America and the British tend to socialise with colleagues regularly. Drunken behaviour will be laughed off next morning and, in some cases, is the norm.”
The guide warns that American businessmen should not expect their British equivalents to be greatly excited by practices such as the working breakfast, reminding readers of Oscar Wilde’s assertion: “Only dull people are interesting at breakfast.” It also points out that smoking has not yet been banned in bars and restaurants (as it has been in many places in America) and that visitors should expect to be greeted by “a haze of smoke that can be blinding” when entering a British pub.
This is precisely the sort of thing that in America would end up with a series of lawsuits. What we Brits regard as flirtatious sexual banter is in New York or San Francisco likely to be seen as an example of the most primitive kind of sexual harassment. The US barman who sells you one drink too many might end up in court if you try to drive home or break a leg in a drunken tumble.
As for smoking, in a sombre reminder of the dangers of po-faced political correctness, a bouncer was this week killed in an argument that erupted when be tried to enforce the no-tobacco rule in a NewYork bar.
Please don’t call me anti-American. There is much about the US that I admire. I lived in New York for three years and loved the place; my grandmother was from Boston, I married an American and my two children have US as well as British passports. It’s just that we need to remind ourselves every now and then that we are an entirely different species to our American cousins.
We can never be like them and they can never be like us. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just the way it is. Even Madonna, who settled here four years ago, has tried to understand us and failed, even though she married a Brit. Who can forget her desperate attempts to fit in - the insistence that she found Bernard Manning really, really funny, the times she dressed up in full country fig to go shooting in the country?
There are, however, signs that she has given up all the efforts at cultural assimilation in favour of an unsparing critique of the British way of life. In an interview to be broadcast this evening on the satellite music channel VH1, she takes a pop at our attitude to work.
“They aren’t willing to work - you know, stay in the office for 12 hours a day. The working week starts at noon on Monday and ends at noon on Friday,” she says. “It’s highly irritating. They leave work at five and there are bank holidays every minute.” Silly girl. In America, part of the problem is that there aren’t enough bank holidays -or, indeed, holidays of any kind. If you’re in your 20s you’re lucky if you get two weeks paid leave a year. A friend of mine who is in his 40s and has been with the same insurance company for almost two decades gets three weeks holiday per annum but feels it might count against him if he takes his full quota. The danger of holidays is that you may start thinking for yourself - and Americans aren’t great at that. They like to be programmed.
YOU don’t just go to the gym; you go to the gym and work your way through a programme that has been devised for you by someone whose own programme has been set for him. Dating is programmed, right down to how, when and where you should ask someone out for dinner and working practices are so programmed that it is often impossible to establish whether you are talking to a human being or a taped message. In fact, what it really comes down to is that Americans would prefer us to “get with the programme”.
I meant speaking as in pronunciation (??), for example they pronounce "s" as "sh" and "z" as "sd" (or at least that's the way i hear them). btw, we have the 3 singular and plural persons and a different conjugation for each one.