HOW NOT TO BE CLEVER

'You foreigners are so clever,' said a lady to me some years ago.

First, thinking of the great amount of foreign idiots and half-wits I had

had the honour of meeting, I considered this remark exaggerated but

complimentary. Since then I have learnt that it was far from it. These few

words expressed the lady's contempt and slight disgust for foreigners.

If you look up the word clever in any English dictionary, you will find

that the dictionaries are out of date and mislead you on this point.

According to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, for instance, the word means

quick and neat in movement .. . skilful, talented, ingenious. Nuttall's

Dictionary gives these meanings: dexterous, skilful, ingenious, quick or

ready-witted, intelligent. All nice adjectives, expressing valuable and

estimable characteristics. A modern Englishman, however, uses the word

clever in the sense: shrewd, sly, furtive, surreptitious, treacherous,

sneaking, crafty, un-English, un-Scottish, un-Welsh. In England it is bad

manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own

personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a

self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of

a different opinion.

A continental gentleman seeing a nice panorama may remark: 'This view

rather reminds me of Utrecht, where the peace treaty concluding the War of

Spanish Succession was signed on the 11 th April, 1713. The river there,

however, recalls the Guadalquivir, which rises in the

Sierra de Cazoria and flows south-west to the Atlantic Ocean and is 6^0

kilometres long. Oh, rivers. . . . What did Pascal say about them? "Les

rivieres sont les chemins qui marchent. . . ." ' This pompous, showing-off

way of speaking is not permissible in England. The Englishman is modest and

simple. He uses but few words and expresses so much - but so much - with

them. An Englishman looking at the same view would remain silent for two or

three hours and think about how to put his profound feeling into words. Then

he would remark: 'It's pretty, isn't it?' An English professor of

mathematics would say to his maid checking up the shopping list: 'I'm no

good at arithmetic, I'm afraid. Please correct me, Jane, if I am wrong, but

I believe that the square root of 97344 is 312.' And about knowledge. An

English girl, of course, would be able to learn just a little more about,

let us say, geography. But it is just not 'chic' to know whether Budapest is

the capital of Roumania, Hungary or Bulgaria. And if she happens to know

that Budapest is the capital of Roumania, she should at least be perplexed

if Bucharest is mentioned suddenly. It is so much nicer to ask, when someone

speaks of Barbados, Banska Bystrica or Fiji: 'Oh those little islands. . . .

Are they British?' (They usually are.)

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 1011