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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4492 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Are Brits on average more intelligent than Americans, at least verbally (restricting both sets to college-educated people, say)? As an American I know I might be conditioned by silly tropes of British sophistication but I feel like there's something here.

  • Based on what Youtube serves up to me occasionally, British talk shows seem more clever
  • Prime Minister's Questions, despite being nonsense, seem to require more quick-wittedness than any comparable American political event I can think of
  • Social customs seem to require saying lots of things in subtler, more roundabout ways, which is simply more mentally taxing for both the speaker and listener

Not that any of these are amazing displays of intelligence. There just seems to be a greater demand on one's verbal faculties in everyday life.

Bill Bryson described one aspect of American culture as "London, England" syndrome. American newspaper headlines tend to provide both the city and the country, whereas their British counterparts only provide the city. He used this to illustrate a point that Americans aren't stupider than Brits, but rather their culture is set up in such a way that they aren't required to expend mental effort on simple cognitive tasks in the way that citizens of other nations are. In other words, the brain is a muscle - don't exercise it, and it atrophies.

American newspaper headlines tend to provide both the city and the country, whereas their British counterparts only provide the city.

To be fair, though, North America has lots and lots of duplicate names, or duplicate-sounding names, for places (the majority of the states in the Union have a "Springfield"). No mandate for uniqueness between ~60 distinct polities and importing a bunch of people who decided to name things after the places they came from for some reason (when they weren't just calling them "New Whatever" in whatever their native language was; sometimes that got translated [New Mexico], sometimes it didn't [Nova Scotia], and rather humorously the former refers to a New World nation itself).

The same thing is true for London, to a degree; there are more than 5 cities and towns named that on the continent (and for bonus points, one of them is a relatively major city). Or Exeter: do you mean the one in NH, RI, Ontario, or the original one in the UK?

And the copying isn't even limited to Old World nations; does "Ontario, CA" refer to the province of Ontario, Canada? Or does it refer to the city of Ontario, in California? Did that event happen in Vancouver, BC; or was it Vancouver, WA? (Bonus points for being only a few hours away from other.) Which Grand Forks do you mean? And so on.

[Come to think of it, if Mexico was still called New Spain, would New Mexico have been called New New Spain? Newer Spain? If after that, an Iberian colony ship lands on a habitable planet would they call it Newest Spain? If they launched two would it be New Newest Spain?]

Sure, but I don't think this phenomenon is unique to the US. There are three towns called New York in the UK too.

Yes, but if any of those three places were referred to in anything other than hyper local media (perhaps the local radio station) then they'd be referred to as New York in North Yorkshire, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if a British press piece was covering something in London, Ontario, then I'd be nearly 100% sure that they'd refer to it as "London in Ontario" or "London, the city in Canada", again for self explanatory reasons.

(FWIW, I don't think that "New York, North Yorkshire" qualifies as a real place. There's an old mill, now with some other commercial uses, but it is at best a single road in Summerbridge. I was surprised as I have some familiarity with the area and had never heard of it.)

Nova Scotia does have a lot of people of Scottish descent (including me), but it was actually given its name when the colony was granted to a Scottish Earl at a time when the inhabitants were all French or indigenous and 150 years before Scots began to settle there in significant numbers.

A big difference between Americans and Europeans is how we view Brits. If your image of Brits is upper class posh people you are American.

If you associate Brits with obese football hooligans causing a scene at a McDonalds at 3 am you are European.

I couldn't put it better. There is a ton of videos and memes mocking the dullness, meaninglessness, and poor quality of life of British lower classes.

On the other hand, Brits seem to me to have many of the smartest white people, with exemplars like Paul Dirac, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Roger Penrose or Timothy Gowers, so the differences are indeed significant.

Calling those video's is generous. I must ask, how does one find such things or become aware of youtube slideshows mocking lower class brits? I stumble across weird shit all the time and I am often asked how I found it when I share it to a group chat. I'm honestly just curious how this discovery happened.

Two of the videos were riding the "Deano" wave as re-popularised by semi-obscure esoteric RW anons on twitter (e.g. https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1572994810499432448 )- which is sort of a British archetypal "working class lad done well" but with the modern consumer culture modernity dialled up to 11. The other two both fall more into the "Gammon" genre, popularised during Brexit and also Euro 2020. They often feature Tango (this chap: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11486337/England-superfan-Tango-Man-apologises-going-topless-Qatar.html) or other Brexit/Nationalistic discussion. These things come and go in waves, TiKTok seems to play a large part, but they're always getting shared by slightly elderly relatives a couple of years after they did the rounds the first time. It mostly seems to be middle class white Brits laughing at their lower class brethren, rather than inter ethnic or anything, and Americans sometimes get involved as well.

The poking fun between classes genre has always existed, but the underlying "Gammon" concept can be traced back at least as far as Enfield's Self-Righteous brothers sketches: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CvbXwwob8Kw.

The British lower classes were thoroughly pwned, as the kids would say. They don't even aspire to rise in the social classes. It is looked down upon to try. I wonder if this is a very long lasting heritage from what the Normans did to the Anglo-Saxons after conquering England. The latter were deeply subjugated, starved, massacred; put in their place. You can see the legacy in the way the language is organized. The words that describe things that are served to a nobler person, or are found in the house, or take place within the house, are French in origin. The words that describe the outside locations, the fields and the work and the serving, etc, are Anglo-Saxon in origin.

England lost a lot of people to emigration in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Maybe the ambitious ones mostly left.

The legacy of the Norman conquest is so significant it is in many ways more similar to what happened in Latin America than other European countries. The upper classes are phenotypically distinct; in the northeast the working class sometimes has a quasi-nordic phenotype, otherwise they are shorter, more squat, have rounder faces.

I know what you're talking about, but I'm confused about Norman vs Nordic phenotypes. Aren't the Normans also Nordic? I'm also not clear what it means when I see very thin faces with fine features, which showed up a lot in old royal portraits.

The Normans are Nordic, unlike the vast majority of the working class. But in the Northeast (Newcastle is an example) one does see working class people with more of that phenotype, taller, blonder, lighter eyes etc.

I would assume the majority of the working class are mostly Anglo-Saxon genetically, which is probably going to be very similar to having Nordic DNA. They're both originally northwestern Germanic peoples. OTOH I could be under-estimating the Celtic component among non-upper class Brits.

It appears as though the modern English are less than 50% Anglo-Saxon, having been diluted through sustained contact and population exchange with France, presumably as a result of the Norman conquest and through migrant populations such as the Huguenots.

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Europeans still have the popular conception of upper class Brits (see stuff like Dinner for One in DACH), they just know it’s only one kind of British person.

US culture is anti-aristocratic and egalitarian. UK culture still has a lot of class stratification.

So in the UK upper class people are expected to have posh accents and witty retorts. This is taught in school. Lower classes have things like cockney rhyming slang to make things difficult for outsiders.

In the US traditions of upper class verbal acuity are frowned upon. Politicians and people on TV are expected to speak in a more folksy manner.

Additionally supporting black voices is expected, so they have things like this national debate championship: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8

Some element might be cultural. Britain dominates the high end of very sophisticated TV programs. Consider University Challenge, Mastermind or Only Connect. These are very hard questions! There's also Yes Minister.

American TV seems to be courser. Even early Veep used much cruder language than Yes Minister. By late Veep it gets ridiculous, they're constantly trying to one-up themselves in crassness. The Thick of It is a bit more contemporary than Yes Minister yet also has a certain level of groundedness and seriousness that Veep lacks. Ianucci made both, there seems to be a US desire for heightened drama and rudeness over pure wordplay.

I can't find an American equivalent to University Challenge, only 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' and 'Jeopardy' which is understandably less sophisticated. Ironically University Challenge was a copy of the American College Bowl, perhaps things were different in the past.

The Thick of It isn’t less sweary than Veep. It’s more that Veep was written by outsiders rather than insiders and so after season 3 the jokes were less creative or funny and they had to rely on a combination of character-based humor and funny profanity. They swapped to a largely American writers’ room afterward and that had advantages in some ways and made things worse in others. Veep season 1 makes no effort to even be American, it’s about as American as GTA, half the expressions are British.

half the expressions are British

Would you mind giving some examples? I've been curious ever since I heard this claim, but for a few reasons I'm not very good at distinguishing them myself.

It’s a common complaint about Succession, too. Things like ending sentences in “yeah?”. Here’s an interview with Matt Walsh (not that one) who plays Mike in Veep where he discusses it. GTA is a good example, I played 4 again recently and it’s full of Americans saying stuff that just sounds off for Americans to say. Even Red Dead 2 has it on occasion, and they made a real effort there. The same of course exists in reverse when American writers try to write British characters.

Isn't Succession based on the Murdochs, though? Rupert is notoriously Australian, and it looks like all three of James, Lachlan and Elizabeth spent most of their careers outside the US.

Per Wikipedia, Logan Roy (the Rupert-equivalent) is British in-universe.

I think there's just more educational stratification in Britain. Upper-class Britons including, to throw out two random examples, Boris Johnson and the actor Tom Hiddleston, still receive a classical education at Eton and Oxbridge which is very verbally-loaded and includes learning Latin and Greek. The comparable tradition in the US died out nearly a century ago (the last American president to know Latin well was apparently Herbert Hoover).

By contrast, the best and brightest Americans today go into STEM fields and receive an education that is very challenging technically, but not so much verbally, at least in my experience (I was genuinely challenged by some of my math, physics, and engineering courses, but writing an essay for a humanities class was always something I could blow off until the last minute and I literally fell asleep during the verbal portion of the SAT and got a perfect score).

An interesting anecdote that might highlight this distinction... I don't know if it's still up-to-date, but I read recently Tom Clancy's Submarine, a overview of modern (in the early 90s) submarines, and one of the points made clear is that the British nuclear submarine officer is a leader first, his training is first and foremost in leadership and then in his specialty, while the American nuclear submarine officer is an engineer first.

My first thought was a difference in educational attainment rates between the countries, but according to Wiki, this difference is tiny.

Part of it is that Britain is a caste-based society. The world you see as a foreigner or someone who interacts with highly educated, largely private-schooled middle class (US: UMC) and above people in the professional world is essentially all drawn from the top 10% of the country. This is true even for many comedians, especially those known for quick wit (like Stephen Fry). They have a largely different culture from the working class, it’s like two different nations, there is very little shared identity at all.

The other part is that the thesis is actually also possible. For example, the English may have higher verbal but lower spatial intelligence than, say, Swedes or Germans or Dutch, who feature widely in many white American ancestries. On the other hand there are also plenty more Irish, Italians and Jews, who stereotypically are more verbally capable/funny/etc.

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