http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1333555.ece
Review of:
Sorry! The English and Their Manners by Henry Hitchings (John Murray)
... Any book about English manners must grapple with concepts of what it is to be English; the problem here being that, once you allow “Englishness”, you must allow Frenchness, Spanishness, Greekness, Germanness (to go no further than the European continent), and pretty soon you are in trouble. As Hitchings says, the study of national character is not respectable nowadays. Or perhaps it is more that the study of foreign national character is not respectable. As we move towards the present day, popular commentary about “The English” doesn’t cease, but it becomes the prerogative of perceptive natives such as Jeremy Paxman, Kate Fox or Harry Mount, who tend to keep the gaze within these borders, as though it were rude to stare.
All analyses of nationhood will reflect the desires and prejudices of the commentator. Orwell’s famous assessment of his compatriots as “stamp-collectors, pigeon fanciers, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword puzzle fans . . . . all the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official”, written in 1941, is at bottom an incantation against the totalitarianism he feared. Hitchings’s official position is that he hasn’t got a position, either on what we are or what we should be. However, being at heart a lexical historian (his first book was on Dr Johnson’s Dictionary), he keeps coming back to the meanings and usages of words as a thread to steady himself, and here, where we get closest to him, he betrays a sense that reticence, evasiveness and strategies of non-confrontation are still central to the English character. His chapter on euphemism is particularly good, showing how the old addiction to saying the opposite of what we mean remains robust in a culture of supposed outspokenness and transparency; so that words such as “should” and “must” are now imperative in meaning but subjunctive in application (we must have lunch), and “it’s my fault” means “it’s your fault”. As for the decline of manners, it seems the rot set in in the eighteenth century, when the notion of “equal conversation” – the flow of ideas and debate animating all parts of civilized life – gave rise to that of (for example) Mary and William Godwin: that manners were artificial, corrupt and a form of oppression, devised to keep women and the poor in their place. ...