That's Not English (8 page)

In which a venerable old word is seized upon by vulgarians—but not Americans.

N
ot long ago, a highly civilized exchange took place on the Internet. A tailor (English) and a haberdasher (American) found themselves in wholehearted agreement on the meaning of a word that both felt had become degraded:
bespoke
. Thomas Mahon had just clarified the meaning for readers of his blog, “English Cut”: “A lot of people use the terms ‘bespoke’ and ‘made-to-measure’ interchangeably. They are mistaken. ‘Bespoke’ . . . dates from the 17th century, when tailors held full lengths of cloth in their premises. When a customer chose a length of material, it was said to have ‘been spoken for.’ Hence, a tailor who makes your clothes individually, to your specific personal requirements, is called ‘bespoke.’ . . . [‘Made-to-measure’] uses a basic, pre-existing template pattern, which is
then adjusted to roughly your individual measurements.” Bespoke tailoring has been going on in England—specifically on Savile Row—for a couple of centuries. In America, not so much. Mr. Jeff Collins, professional haberdasher, responded in the comments: “Here in the United States of America, it is very difficult to find someone who does what you do. Most clothing is made to measure, like most of what I provide for my clients, and it bothers me when others in my profession claim to make a ‘bespoke’ suit. They use the term too loosely. There is something exclusive and regal about wearing a bespoke suit.”

A Savile Row bespoke suit takes about one hundred hours to make and, depending on the materials used, costs between £3,000 and £10,000. Everything, from the pattern to the buttonholes, is handmade, and the customer usually has four fittings to ensure perfection.
Bespoke
is not a word that has historically had relevance to 99.999 percent of English people. Kings, rock stars, and oligarchs are among the lucky few who are willing and able to pay for the privilege of so much choice today. But then, the rich (no matter their nationality) have always taken a lot of choices for granted.

The word
bespoke
is virtually unknown in America, which is astonishing because you would think that the American advertising industry would love to get its grubby mitts on a classy word like that. But just because the word is seldom heard and the typical American man wears mostly khakis or jeans and sneakers doesn’t mean America lacks the concept. “Having it your way” is considered a birthright by Americans, who bring a curatorial zeal to almost everything they do.

Clothing may not be bespoke in America, but want to know what is? Sandwiches. No one behind the deli counter will raise
an eyebrow as you order to your eleven exacting specifications. Then, they will make it, fast, with no eye-rolling. Did I mention this is also cheap? When I went back to America, after a long absence, I was a little miffed when my roast (NOT honey roast) turkey, Swiss cheese, spicy mustard, light mayo, pickles, tomatoes, no lettuce, on whole wheat had gone up to $6.50. However, when it arrived it was not only a work of art, but a truly intimidating size.

In England, most of the 11.5 billion sandwiches (pronounced “samwidges”) people buy each year are premade and packed in wedge-shaped cardboard boxes with little cellophane windows offering a preview of their gooey or wilted contents. Depending on how fancy your purveyor, that could be anything from cheese and pickle (a somewhat cloying brown relish made from onions) to prawn mayonnaise (shrimp salad) or my personal favorite, chicken and avocado with pine nuts (don’t hate). Pret A Manger (the French name lets you know it’s middle-class; the absence of the circumflex and grave accent reassures you you’re still in England) is one of the most popular sandwich shops, offering about twenty choices of sandwich every day, with seasonal menu changes. A few branches have opened in New York and in Target stores in America, and the chain is gaining a following. This is partly because of diligent market research. Pret caters to American tastes and hasn’t assumed that the same offerings would sell in both countries. But novelty has also played a role in their success, and novelty wears off. Eat a prepacked and arbitrarily sized sandwich for lunch every day and you will soon tire of the standard fillings and the cutesy convenience of their little boxes. Lunch at Pret is more expensive than at the local deli. They offer the comforting illusion of choice and the promise
that all the sandwiches were “made fresh in this shop today!” (“Made fresh today” is an attribute one would hope to take for granted in a sandwich, but apparently that ship has sailed.)

A friendly warning to Americans: Accepting standardized sandwiches could be the beginning of the end of choice as you know it. It smacks of socialism. Pretty soon, those who want something a bit more personalized will have to do what the English do and resort to “bespoke” sandwich bars, which will either make the thinnest, saddest version of your favorite sandwich ever (trying to compete with Pret on price) or take ages to deliver something gorgeous that will have you pawning your firstborn in no time. And nothing will save you from the amount of eye-rolling you will have to endure if your rigorous quality standards exceed five directives, no matter how politely phrased. Mayo, fine, but “light” mayo? “Bloody ’ell!” you can hear the guy thinking. This is not choice as Americans have come to expect it. Even Burger King lets you have it your way.

It would be unfair to say that a nation ends up with the sandwiches it deserves. But it is fair to say that a nation gets the sandwiches it
demands
. While the premade sandwiches that most English people eat for lunch are quite good (in their sense of
quite
), they represent an acceptance of not getting exactly what you want. You may get something you like, choosing among set options, but you are not invited to start from scratch, to choose your own adventure. Where is England’s sense of entitlement?

I’m going to go out on a limb and blame Hitler. During World War II, a typical weekly ration of food in England included about four pieces of bacon, four ounces of margarine, two ounces of butter, one ounce of cheese, a bit of tea, and eight ounces of sugar. Leaving the sugar aside, it would be hard to turn that into
a single lunch today. Meat was allocated by price, and other foods like canned goods and grains required points to buy. Rationing went on, to varying degrees, from 1940 until 1954. While Americans were enjoying the postwar boom, the English were making do and mending for nine more
years
.

People who were children during rationing have especially vivid memories of the food they ate. The BBC keeps an archive of first-person stories about the war, and it’s full of homely and fascinating details. The relative lack of sweets meant that a carrot on a stick was considered a treat. Bananas, which are wasted in quantity today as they go brown on kitchen counters everywhere, were the stuff of legend. In Auberon Waugh’s memoir,
Will This Do?
he tells of a time when every child in Britain was rationed a single banana. He had never tasted one. When his mother arrived home with three bananas, his father, Evelyn, promptly consumed all three, with cream and sugar, in front of his anguished children. Many years later, his son wrote (unconvincingly), “It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him.”

Another man who grew up in wartime writes that whether or not he would clean his plate was “not subject to debate.” If he did not, he was “admonished for ingratitude and told in no uncertain terms that there was a child somewhere in the world who would be very glad to eat what was in front of me . . . As a consequence, I perfected a sensory art . . . involving first sniffing the food, and then . . . rapidly shoveling up and swallowing the despised comestibles without permitting any portion of them to make contact with my tongue.” This generation of plate-cleaners would reach adulthood—and more prosperous times—only to subject their children to the same rule.

Austerity meant that the few pleasures of the table came
from unlikely sources. A woman writes, “One highlight for me was the coming of spam from America. It was an oasis in our desert of mediocrity; an elixir in our sea of austerity. It seems to me that it was meatier, juicier, and much tastier than it is now. (Tricks of memory again, no doubt.) We ate it in sandwiches; we ate it fried with chips; cold with salad; chopped in spam-and-egg pies, until, of course, it ceased to provide the variety we longed for, but I never tired of it.” Not for nothing is Monty Python’s SPAM skit one of their best known.

People’s memories of wartime deprivation are tinged with a palpable sense of pride. The fairness of rationing and the shared fears and challenges brought people together and showed them how tough and resilient they really were. There is genuine nostalgia—even sentimentality—about those years in England now. Enduring a war on home soil instilled a sense of duty and national pride. It also lowered people’s expectations and stopped individuals imagining that their desires could, or should, be the center of the universe. This sense of entitlement only began its slow recovery around the 1980s and, funnily enough, that was when Pret A Manger, with its dizzying varieties of sandwiches
made fresh today
, came to be.

The war has many lingering legacies, and one of them is the idea that “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” This is often repeated to small children in England. Another axiom is “‘I want’ never gets.” This is to encourage politeness (“Please may I have . . .”) and to quell the unvarnished id that children haven’t yet learned to mask with justifications, as adults have. This is a worthy goal, but it is hard to imagine an American parent using the same means to the end. These sentiments are so un-American it is not even funny. Give it another generation
and they probably won’t be very English, either. Blame the marketers.

The shops in England that offer the most choice today are actually borrowing the word
bespoke
from Savile Row:
bespoke
cakes,
bespoke
sandwiches,
bespoke
coffees. Everything is spoken for now. The dumbing down of the concept of
bespoke
in its native country would make Mr. Collins, haberdasher, of the USA, want to stick a needle in his eye. It may sound a bit silly, but it represents a level of choice that is actually new for England. It’s about time. Americans’ expectation of choice can come across as childish, selfish, and fickle to the English. And it is true that the more often you get what you demand, the more likely it is that you will start to believe it’s because you deserve it—an unattractive attitude at any age. But consider: If Elvis had been English, we would not have the fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich. America brought us the Dagwood, the Philly cheesesteak, and the club sandwich—apparently a favorite of the Duke of Windsor and his wife, Wallis Simpson, who knew a little something about the pros and cons of choosing your own adventure. Because as Americans say, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. But also: Be careful what you wish
for.

In which we unpack the reasons why the English take more—and longer—vacations than Americans.

C
. S. Lewis wrote that “the future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” For all their differences, Americans and the English have very similar attitudes toward time. Both cultures value punctuality and hard work and live by the clock. They share a sense of time as a resource that can be saved, spent, or wasted, though perhaps only an American would express the opinion, in earnest, that “time is money.” They do have subtly different ways of expressing the passage of time, but these are never sources of lasting confusion. The English write their dates starting with the day first, followed by the month and then the year. Americans start with the month. The English use a twenty-four-hour clock, in which
4:30
P
.
M
.
is expressed as “16.30” whenever precision is called for, such as scheduling (pronounced
sheduling
) meetings or talking about train or flight times. With the exception of their military, Americans go by a twelve-hour clock. Americans say “four thirty” or “half past four.” The English do, too, but they also might say “half four.” The English have a special word,
fortnight
, that means two weeks. Americans just say
two weeks
.

Two weeks—
one bloody fortnight
—is the amount of time the English are appalled to hear that Americans “only” have for
holiday
(vacation) each year. This is perhaps the one point of true divergence when it comes to English and American attitudes toward time. The English get—and take—at least twenty days of vacation, plus public holidays (called
bank holidays
), amounting to a full month of paid vacation each year. Twenty days is the minimum allowed under European Union rules, and England is surrounded by countries where people take even more vacation than the English do. The French get about nine weeks, and even the Germans have eight, which does not seem like something Angela Merkel would have signed off on. Paid vacation is therefore seen as a human right, not a privilege, and the English feel fully entitled to take advantage of it. This results in genuinely slow times of year when few people are at their desks. About 60 percent of UK residents take their main vacations (of at least a fortnight) in July and August, during the school holidays, and the country comes to a virtual standstill during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. This is one of the single most civilized aspects of life in one of the most civilized countries in the world.

In stark contrast, the United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee workers any paid vacation, and
one of only a few rich countries (including Japan) that doesn’t require employers to provide any paid holidays. Although 77 percent of US companies do offer paid vacations and holidays, a quarter of Americans get none at all. The typical worker gets just ten days per year, along with six public holidays—and this only after being employed by the same company for at least a year.

Americans who are lucky enough to be entitled to paid vacation very often leave this perk on the table. According to a recent study by the staffing firm Adecco USA, 75 percent of workers will not have taken all of their vacation days by November. Although it is tempting to say that this is because of their strong Puritan work ethic, it is more likely because they are under pressure not to take time off, or are saving up for a few days with family at Christmas, since at most American companies it’s business as usual on December 26, a day the English know as a public holiday called Boxing Day. Americans who manage to go on vacation rarely truly disconnect, and some check in with the office daily. Otherwise, they risk being seen as slackers, or resented by their peers. It is telling that the Adecco study showed that 65 percent of respondents said they would like to have two to three additional weeks of vacation time, even though most of them weren’t using the time they already had.

It is not unusual for the English to take a vacation as long as a fortnight a couple of times each year, and their close proximity to other countries in Europe means it is common for them to travel abroad, usually in search of the sun that’s in short supply in their own country. Most head for the south of France, Spain, and Portugal. Here I feel compelled to note that, although the English make fun of Americans for saying French words with an ersatz accent—fill-ay, buff-ay—and they will aggressively
mispronounce these words—
fill-ET
,
buffy
—when they go on holiday in Spain, the same people have no compunction about putting on a Spanish accent to tell you they have been to “Eyebeetha” or “Marbayah.” Ibiza and Marbella are known for their glamorous clubs and chilled-out beaches—the destinations of the fit and the tan-aspiring. Some sunny and cheap destinations are more popular with English pensioners (retirees)—like the Algarve region of Portugal, which my friend Catherine has dubbed the “Algrave.” One almost feels sorry for these refugee retirees, forced in their desperation for a bit of reliable weather to colonize unsuspecting corners of southern Europe, where they flock together, importing all of their own food and neglecting to learn Portuguese or Spanish. All that this proves is that every country really needs—no, deserves—its very own Boca Raton.

Around 80 percent of UK citizens have passports, and other countries in Europe account for most of their trips abroad. Their most popular destinations outside Europe are very adventurous by American standards: Cyprus, Egypt, North Africa, Goa, and Gambia—closely followed by Florida. Although the tendency of the English to travel on package holidays to all-inclusive resorts means that they cannot lay claim to the title of world’s most intrepid travelers, they make it farther afield than most Americans. They do it younger, too, thanks to the somewhat recent tradition—at least among better-off students—of taking a gap year, or twelve-month holiday, before starting university. This is made possible in part by cheaper university fees, which mean that English students can expect to graduate with less debt than Americans. Also, the English can use their EU passports to work abroad, so they don’t have to sponge off their parents, though many do anyway.

A 2013 Cheapflights.com survey showed that 85 percent of Americans prefer to return to places that they know rather than take a gamble on a new destination. This may be why New York, Florida, California, Nevada, and Hawaii account for 98 percent of American travel. William D. Chalmers, author of
America’s Vacation Deficit Disorder
, laments the days when American families used to light out for the territory in their cars, and quotes Charles Kuralt’s depressing observation that “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.” Chalmers has estimated that fewer than 5 percent of Americans travel overseas, even though the latest State Department statistics indicate that 46 percent have passports—a higher percentage than ever before.

America is a wonderful and richly varied country in which to travel—just ask any of the four million UK residents who vacationed there last year. It is also an expensive, difficult, and time-consuming country to get around (and leave). Trains are slow and antiquated. Gas prices may be famously low by comparison to most other countries, but the distances one must cover by car are staggering. When I was a child, living in south Florida, it took my family a minimum of eight hours to get to Disney World, in the middle of the state, and another five to get to the state line.

Is it any wonder that Disney World and visits to Grandma in Savannah were our typical vacations? We rarely flew as a family, and we only knew three or four families who ever made it to Europe—usually to visit relatives. Epcot’s World Showcase, with its eleven ersatz “countries”—Mexico, Norway, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Morocco, France, the United Kingdom,
Canada, and (weirdly) the good old USA—was as close as I got to leaving America before the age of nineteen, and I was absolutely enthralled by it: the damp, drainlike smells of the Mexican and Norwegian pavilions (which must have emanated from their water features), the pastries of “France” mixing queasily with the sushi from “Japan” as we toddled off to Future World.

In the past few decades, air travel has become cheaper and more accessible in America and England, but no more pleasant. Stories of indignities endured by low-cost airline passengers abound, but it is hard to imagine a worse experience than that provided by Ryanair, one of Europe’s most popular discount airlines. Up until the moment of takeoff, fliers are nickel-and-dimed with charges for printing boarding passes, checking bags, bringing carry-ons, and selecting seats. Between takeoff and landing, surly staff hector them with a variety of small-time sales pitches—newspapers, drinks, snacks, even scratch-off lottery tickets. (“Now is the time on Ryanair when we poke you in the eye with a sharp stick. Goggles, ten euro!”) If you play by their Byzantine rules, though, the flights are dirt cheap. The English have learned to live with this in order to stretch their travel budgets—sometimes, it pays to be willing to leave in the middle of the night or fly to out-of-the-way regional airports (a voluntary simulation of the jet lag they might otherwise miss out on by traveling within Europe). Americans have had a harder time coming to terms with the compromises of budget fares. They can’t seem to get over their outrage at getting exactly what they’ve paid for.

The British pound is so strong that for the English, many destinations are cheaper than a week at home. Especially America. For a while you could not swing a cat in a Florida airport
without hitting an English tourist with an empty suitcase, ready to fill up with tax-free shopping. Hotel corridors are littered with their discarded shopping bags and boxes. Every London taxi driver has seemingly been able to treat his family to a week on Miami Beach. For Americans, Europe is comparatively expensive. Most items cost in pounds or euros what they would in dollars at home—so shopping isn’t very affordable. One is more likely to find Americans at the museums, some of which are generously free in England, whereas a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York will set you back twenty-five dollars. They also favor cultural sites for the chance to marvel at architecture that predates any in America by hundreds of years.

The English like to vacation in their own country, and they do visit historic houses and places like Stonehenge and Stratford-upon-Avon. But the twee quaintness of much of it is old hat to them. Many live in houses that bring them into daily contact with the way people lived in ye olden times. For example, a drafty bathroom is tacked onto the back of a house because bathrooms did not exist when it was built. Closets are few and far between. The English are in touch with their history in quotidian ways that Americans aren’t, but it isn’t necessarily by choice. English homes can be quite uncomfortable—even the newer ones, as English homes are shrinking in size. The Royal Institution of British Architects reports that in 1920, average homes usually measured 1,647 square feet and had four bedrooms, while today’s equivalent has three bedrooms and is 925 square feet. The average one-bedroom flat is now the same size as a London Underground carriage.

American homes are generally much larger. In 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet, up eighty-eight square
feet from the previous year. Anxiety about paying for these ever-larger and more comfortable homes might be one factor keeping Americans on their toes at work, and stopping them from taking their much-needed vacations. But if Americans could be said to be more at ease at home, the English are almost certainly more at ease in the world.