Are British stereotypes offensive?

Post Reply New Topic

you forgot the cucumber sandwich

Ok calling me a liar seems a little harsh? I'll give you a thinking exercise, name me one non-English language in Europe that has the most chance of being understood by a native English speaker? (I assure you its not French).

No, but if you said the exact same thing about black people then you'd probably have gotten a warning from the mods about being racist.



British people aren't as polite and well-spoken as you think. This occurs very regularly in places like public transport.


Edit: Damn, stupid YouTube has to age restrict everything. I can't find many public freakouts/meltdowns on YouTube that aren't American.

Last edited by Joe90 on 23 Mar 2021, 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Context is key....slight nuance

I went into an art gallery once, and there was a picture painted of a white Englishman drinking a cup of tea, and it was the most stereotypical English painting you'd ever see. But there were no paintings of any black people eating a watermelon. Actually there weren't any paintings of any black people. I'm not saying it's not offensive, I'm just wondering how the English equivalent is never offensive.

In the Melbounre Art Gallery we have English painting section from the 19th century and earlier and not surprisingly 90% of the subject matter are self-portraits of the wealthy/aristocrats.

How would one compare a picture of a person drinking tea----with a picture of a person eating a watermelon?

The person drinking tea would probably be portrayed as being elegant.

The person eating a watermelon would probably be portrayed as being a sloppy eater.

But if the person eating a watermelon was white, nobody would bat an eye.

Unless the watermelon was lovingly sliced into little squares with toothpicks decorated with a bow that madam or the master of the mansion could delicately pick at his or her leisure.

Last edited by cyberdad on 23 Mar 2021, 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's a Dave Chapelle joke about fried chicken that also aligns with this...

Basically this.

Brits dominated the planet so its okay to lampoon them.

Is the punchline because it's delicious?

My personal opinion here, which I'm sure will offend a few people:

Us Brits were international shitbags for centuries. Other European nations were playing the colonialism game too, sometimes with equally horrid results for those on the receiving end, but we were the best at it, and therefore the worst.

A big part of post-Colonial Britain (and post-Colonialism in general) is belated acceptance of thoroughly deserved flak. I know I wasn't personally responsible for the things that happened, but I DO know that I have no right to object to any form of criticism now, unless it's borderline insane. At the end of the day we know what's true and what isn't, but to throw a strop when someone accuses us of being cricket-obsessed cockneys with bad teeth is just not on. We're gradually realising that we were the villains internationally for quite a while, and yet somehow we're just getting barbed comments and the odd meme instead of an international kicking, so that's a result. To object would be hypocritical. Especially as irony and self-depreciation were already highly valued in the British psyche.

What's interesting is whether other nations will be able to make the same leap. In 200 years will Americans and Russians be able to laugh at themselves to that extent? In 300 years, will the Chinese?

What the heck are you talking about?

To most native English speakers German is as difficult to understand as French if not more so.

Both French linguists and German linguists have mischeviously claimed English to be a "dialect" of their own languages (French or German respectively).

As a my linguistics professor said "at its heart English is a Germanic language, but one that is heavily influenced by Romance".

We WOULD be speaking a language indistinquishable from modern Frisian today except for that one thing that happened in history. That thing being the Battle of Hastings in 1066.The very thing I am talking about.

And whats this crap about "anglo celtic"? The Anglosaxon invaders borrowed only about a dozen words from the Celtic Britons into English. But English has about ten thousand words borrowed from French by Britain's Norman rulers.

Though classified as a Germanic language English is in fact a rather deviant member of the family, and quite different from the continental Germanic languages. Partially its because of the breakdown of the German type grammar due to the blending of Anglo Saxon and Norse, but also because the added layers of Latin influence (from both the church and Latin by way of French from the Normans).

For your own sake you ought to get a little more basic education about this.



Here is good primer. The journalist team of McNeil and Leherer did this PBS doc series. Forty minutes in it deals with the Norman Conquest. But its great to watch from start to finish.

Classifications mean little when it comes to real world communication.

In essence English should be a stand-alone language because it has evolved its own idioms/idiosyncrasies .

I don't know the exact figure but 1 in 3 Australians and New-Zealanders are Scottish, Irish or Welsh. The culture here is always described as "Anglo-celtic" as there's virtually no pure bloods left