Quotes About Culture

don't know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward, undereducated shitkickers who don't know any better or whether they know better but don't care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated shitkickers.

The British are surely the only people in the world who have made a culinary feature of boiled cartilage and phlegm.

No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.

Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.)

The drift of all this was that the British don't expect over-the-counter drugs to change their lives, whereas we Americans will settle for nothing less.

Unlike the curled shoe tongues that are consumed in Britain or the boringly crisp, regimented strips we go for in America, Australian bacon has a rough, meaty, fair dinkum heartiness. It looks as if it was taken off the pig while it was trying to escape. You can almost hear the squeal in every bite. Lovely.

A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

It takes a special kind of vigilance to make your way across a continent where people voluntarily ingest tongues, kidneys, horsemeat, frogs' legs, intestines, sausages made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows.

Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings—

People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

though I confess a certain fondness for the old-style Wimpy's with their odd sense of what constituted American food, as if they had compiled their recipes from a garbled telex).

Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These

if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.

Personally I can think of nothing more exciting—certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee—than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about.

Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

People in Philadelphia don't come from there; they come from "Fuhluffia.

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.

noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me.

In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath.

To this day, I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.

In Baltimore (pronounced Balamer), an eagle is an "iggle," a tiger is a "tagger," water is "wooder," a power mower is a "paramour," a store is a "stewer," clothes are "clays," orange juice is "arnjoos," a bureau is a "beero," and the Orals are of course the local baseball team.

Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream

I read once that the furthest distance the average American will walk without getting into a car is six hundred feet, and I fear the modern British have become much the same, except that on the way back to the car the British will drop some litter and get a tattoo.