Speaking of the British
c.moreover.com
Speaking of the British
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Re: Speaking of the British
#2There's a lot to be written on the subject of the British (or just the English, the other parts of Britain being a whole different ballgame) and speech. Certainly I don't know of anywhere else where a person's manner of speech tells you nearly as much about their geographical and socioeconomic origin. (But of course, I only speak one language so my attention is pretty restricted).
In Australia they say there are three accents: broad, general and cultivated, and which one you have is mostly about your socioeconomic level. In my experience, though, it's more of a spectrum, and the "broad" accent goes in several different directions depending on where you are -- I can usually pick out a Queenslander, for instance.
The most interesting thing I've noticed about American accents is that you can often tell someone's political persuasion, at least on the radio, if not from their accent then from their manner of speaking. Flip through the radio dial in some unknown area and you can instantly tell whether you're listening to a right-wing or left-wing show -- the right-wing voice is deeper and more aggressive while the left-wing voice sounds higher-pitched and a bit naggy.
Re: Speaking of the British
#3[deleted]
Re: Speaking of the British
#4"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet"
Good grades are certainly not enough, but they are almost always required. Oxbridge only invites the best students to interview, and even the top 5 most academically competitive schools in the UK struggle to send more than a third of their students to Oxford or Cambridge in a good year.
Re: Speaking of the British
#5"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet" Good grades are certainly not enough, but they are almost always required. Oxbridge only invites the best students to interview, and even the top 5 most academically competitive schools in the UK struggle to send more than a third of their students to Oxford or Cambridge in a good year.
"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet"
The largest empire the world has ever seen whittled down to its homeland, a naval base in the med, and some godforsaken islands in the south atlantic. I'd call that pretty disastrous.
It'll only get worse. In an increasingly technical world, the brits have the wrong culture of Snow's two cutures running the show.
Re: Speaking of the British
#6Yep. This rings true even of technical graduates. Makes them really hard to interview because they are so good at interviewing!
I think it's an under-rated skill outside oxbridge. I certainly think it's helped me and I only have the very edges of this skill that I picked up at Cambridge.
Re: Speaking of the British
#7I went to Oxford. I studied Physics. Yes, I learned to "wing it". If you can maneuver your way through a "tutorial" (2 students, one tutor) where the person evaluating you is one of the smartest people in the world and an expert with 40 years more experience than you, and you're hungover and didn't really study the material properly, and still come out looking ok, you can deal with almost any situation where you need to "wing it" in the future. It's solid training.
That said, most of those students were very, very, very smart. To me, Oxford was the place where I went from finding it fairly easy to get whatever grades I wanted to struggling and working hard to get the minimum I found acceptable (a 2:1, or Upper Second, result in the overall degree). That was because the final grades were all relative, and there were a lot of very, very smart students I was competing against.
And, as far as the subject studied is concerned, don't forget that in the UK people rarely go on to work in the subject they studied. Sure, it's still better to do hard sciences, but apart from lawyers and doctors, most people end up doing something else after university.
Which is fine, imho - university is not and should not be training for a job, but, instead, training for life. And as far as life is concerned, in the world as it is today, winging it is certainly a more valuable skill than quantum mechanics.
Re: Speaking of the British
#8Why is this a link on c.moreover.com and not ft.com? All the sharing links at the bottom of the page use an ft.com URL.
Re: Speaking of the British
#9Odd that he mentions Margaret Thatcher without mentioning she was once a research chemist and had a chemistry degree.
Doesn't fit with his content free story I guess.
p.s. the link is bad, it's not moreover.com it's from the ft.com.
Re: Speaking of the British
#10This phenomenon isn't limited to England. The one thing all Harvard undergrads learn (probably as much from one another as from the professors) is how to defend themselves in conversation. Some are smart, and some aren't, but by the time they graduate they all know how to sound smart.