On Englishness
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthFrom the Random House page on Julian Barnes' Arthur and George, quoting and then commenting on Barnes, in #8 ("He's British!") of '10 Reasons We Love Julian Barnes':
"I like to think about what the idea of my country is -- and what it has become. [Englishness] certainly enters into Arthur and George passingly." Only passingly? In the course of an hour-long conversation with Barnes, we heard him use the following words and phrases: 'stroppy', 'bolshy', 'complete rubbish' and 'posh bingo'. We loved every minute of it.
Q1. Does Barnes' conversational English have any direct relation to the subject of one of his novels?
Q2. Do Americans really 'love every minute' of our quaint British idiom?
Q3. Is 'British' a synonym for 'English'?
In other news, am slowly recovering from lurgy with the help of antibiotics: sick of being ill: determined not to venture outside until I can breathe properly.
"I like to think about what the idea of my country is -- and what it has become. [Englishness] certainly enters into Arthur and George passingly." Only passingly? In the course of an hour-long conversation with Barnes, we heard him use the following words and phrases: 'stroppy', 'bolshy', 'complete rubbish' and 'posh bingo'. We loved every minute of it.
Q1. Does Barnes' conversational English have any direct relation to the subject of one of his novels?
Q2. Do Americans really 'love every minute' of our quaint British idiom?
Q3. Is 'British' a synonym for 'English'?
In other news, am slowly recovering from lurgy with the help of antibiotics: sick of being ill: determined not to venture outside until I can breathe properly.
no subject
Date: Saturday, January 5th, 2008 05:53 pm (UTC)Q2: Many of us Anglophiles find your idioms delightful and charming. Partly because we manage to get mostly the attractive bits of your pop culture and more easily ignore the rest.
Q3: We use 'British' as a way of saying 'English, Welsh or Scottish', as it's a relatively small island and we're not so attuned to local differences.
no subject
Date: Saturday, January 5th, 2008 10:08 pm (UTC)During my four years in the States, I found it was so for about ten seconds, after which people read my expression and backtracked, with apologies.