#anglophiles

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

It's funny how the women on this site used to worship the British in the early 2010's because of the BBC Sherlock and Doctor Who. Now they just ruthlessly shit on the British every chance they get.

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.

- Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

[volumes-and-vines]

“How beautiful this all is,” she said! “How lucky I feel to live just here, of all the spots on earth. To see the same flowers come out every spring in the meadows, and the same stream always running. I suppose it must seem a very bounded existence to you, with your experience of the world, but my roots go so deep...”

~Angels and Insects~A.S. Byatt

[alittledropofheaven]

Tbh Idk where the stereotype of English people being polite to a fault comes from? Like as someone who originally comes from a country that was colonised and brutalised by them until mid 20th century, has met some proper English wankers in Australia and in Asian countries, and also regularly hears and watches examples of racism occurring in England, this idea of like WASP gentry being super nice to me as an Indian lady just seems alien and highly implausible. I feel like maybe this politeness would be conditional based on the other person's whiteness? Also by all accounts including my mums I've heard Londoners are snobby arseholes and I don't think that'd improve the more provincial you'd get. Is this something dreamt up by US anglophiles who watch reruns of Sherlock or like Downton Abbey constantly or can someone English attest to this??

[jupitermelichios]

Brit-pick advice: Measurements

Americans are aware of the concept of Europe using metric measurements, and most of the time if you’re writing something set in Europe that’s fine. But it falls down if you’re writing about the UK.

The UK uses a horrific bastardised set of measurements that is part Imperial, part Metric and part ‘this worked for our ancestors so it’s good enough for us’ nonsense.

We measure human height in feet and inches generally speaking. Weight in stone and pounds (but babies are weighed in lb and ounces, which is about the only time ounces are still used). Doctors increasingly will take the measurements in kg and meters, but that’s not how people think of them.

Milk and beer come in pints. Soft drinks and water come in liters. Wine comes in centiliters. No one knows why. If you’re dealing with more an a bottle, then you get into some fascinating bullshit measurements like hogsheads. (Fun fact, a hogshead is a different amount depending on what liquid you’re measuring, since a hogshead was originally ‘as much of the stuff as you could import before massive import duties applied’ and import duties were different for different liquids. There’s also firkins, but fuck them.)

Distance is measured in imperial miles, land in acres and hectares (but most British people can do a rough km to mile conversation in their head if they drive abroad often). Buildings will usually be measured in square feet, but it can be meters.

Recipes are usually in grams/liters and spoon measurements, except where they’re in pounds/fluid ounces and spoons. We don’t have measuring cups - if a british recipe calls for a cup of something, it means it’s a pretty vague recipe and the cup in question is any mug you happen to have lying around).

Big supermarkets will do everything in kilograms, but smaller shops will often use lb and kg interchangeably. Greengrocers will often list price per kg and price per lb. Sweet shops will sell sweets by the quarter (1/4 lb) or in grams.

Our money is metric (also we don’t name coins the way Americans do beyond shortening the names a bit - tuppence in place of two pennies is old fashioned but still used - but we generally say ‘p’ rather than pence) but that’s pretty recent. My mum grew up with imperial money, which was crazy nonsense, and a lot of us who grew up after the change have a rough idea of imperial pricing and how it worked because of older books and tv shows. (If you’re writing anything set before 1960, have fun diving down the rabbit hole that is pre-metric currency).

Big numbers will be done by analogy. I’ve talked about this before, but you know those diagrams you get in kids science books showing you that a dinosaur was bigger than the Eiffel tower or whatever? Everything gets measured like that here. Serious news programs will describe the sizes of fucking everything like that. The usual measurements are ‘london busses end to end’, ‘x number of football pitches’ or ‘the size of Wales’. Natural disasters in particular (forest fires, deforestation, flooding etc) will always come in ‘areas the size of Wales’. Always. (I have a theory this might be because we switch between measurements so much, so they can’t rely on the assumption that everyone can visualise a foot or a meters, so we do analogies instead).

Oh and car engines are measured in metric, but their efficiency is measured in miles and gallons.

I’ll drink 300ml of juice from a half-pint glass and warn 6ft4in tall people to duck before going through a 2m doorway and order 1/4lb of toffee that cost £2 per 100g. We all just switch between two or three measurement systems all day without thinking about it.

Anyway, I hope that was helpful to some of you. Sorry we’re a nonsense country.

[wandering-there-and-back-again]

Person: I don’t like Israelis because of what they’ve done to Palestine

Same Person: OMG your English accent is so sexy

[smoops-and-smoops-blog]

Hey there girl.... I hear you like them Richard Armitage gifs.

[ruindunburnit]

Apparently, there’s a name for Americans who are sickeningly obsessed with British culture? And I just want to thank whoever coined the phrase ‘teaboo’ because it is exactly true.