Quotes About Tradition

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo" is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech.

We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can't spell even common words get to decide what survives. That

I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye

There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names.

It was always Christmas at my grandparents' house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody's birthday. There was always happiness there.

Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from "an undemonstrative Nordic race," which in her case was wholly untrue.

In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, "Wassail!" and for the recipient to respond "Drinkhail!" and for the participants to repeat the exercise until comfortably horizontal.

Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no.

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

Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton

Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week.

Incidentally, our standard image of servants in black uniforms with frilly caps, starched aprons and the like actually reflects a fairly short-lived reality. Servants' uniforms didn't become routine until the rise of cotton imports in the 1850s. Before then the quality of clothes worn by the upper classes was so instantly and visibly superior to that of the working classes that it wasn't necessary to distinguish servants with uniforms.

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—

Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

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.

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ?and so on.

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ?and so on.

These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.

shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally

But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog.

Did you know—this is a little-known fact but absolute truth—that when they dedicate a new multistory car park, the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.

The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.