Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
A runaway bestseller in the UK, Watching the English is now available in the U.S. for the first time! Witty and wise, Kate Fox reveals the quirks, habits, and foibles of the English in her book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Putting the national character under her...
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A runaway bestseller in the UK, Watching the English is now available in the U.S. for the first time! Witty and wise, Kate Fox reveals the quirks, habits, and foibles of the English in her book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Putting the national character under her microscope, Fox explores this strange and fascinating culture, governed by a complex set of unspoken rules and a bizarre code of conduct. Through anthropological analysis and a series of unorthodox experiments (often using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Fox discovers what these unwritten codes tell us about Englishness: the rules of weather-speak, the ironic-gnome rule, the reflex apology rule, the paranoid-pantomime rule, class anxiety tests, and the money-talk taboo, among others. Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful, and often hilarious look at English society.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781857885088 (1857885082)
ASIN: 1857885082
Publish date: April 2nd 2008
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
Pages no: 440
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Travel,
Humor,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Science,
Culture,
Sociology,
Anthropology,
Psychology,
Society
Good insights buried in lots of repetition and stating the obi
It gets repetitive (the construction is a killer, and Ms. Fox seems to have had her conclusions firmly in mind as she started writing, and EVERYTHING seems to support her theses), but overall, it is an interesting read, a must-read for any anglophile. I recommend it to all of my students.
Regarding American "histrionics" about weather - the English transplants I knew in Texas were always freaking out about the major weather events like hurricanes, tornados, flash floods, droughts, hailstorms, violent winds... Like they were completely stunned. No stiff upper lip at all. I suppose it...
Watching the English walks the line between popular science and a more academic text, and often falls on the wrong side of that line. The sheer amount of information collected from direct observation is incredibly insightful, but reading it all at once is a bit difficult. I had to take a break about...
In "Watching The English" anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and ...