Tennessee Mick-Taking

I was not prepared for what the British call "banter." Keep in mind, I attended an all-girls school from age 11-18, and then I was surrounded by wonderfully close female friends in college. My knowledge of How Guys Get Along, and especially of How British Guys Get Along, has been forged in the fire of the Bryanston dining hall.

The dining hall here is a large tent. It has laminate flooring and chandeliers and semi-permanent drink dispensers, but let's call a spade a spade; it is a tent. A tastefully appointed tent, but a tent nonetheless.

The real Dining Hall is being refurbished, and apparently come November we will pick up and move back to the main building, where a new seating arrangement will establish itself accordingly.

The current arrangement is this: More fashion catwalk than chapel aisle, a space cuts up the middle of the room (tables on either side) and provides a thoroughfare from the main course to the drink machines. According to habit and unspoken hierarchy, the oldest students sit toward the back, the youngest students sit closer to the front, and resident teachers sit in the first two rows.

It's at these front tables where I, sitting shoulder to shoulder with rugby coaches and rowing coaches, learned how to get the mick taken out of me. By lads, no less.

Translational Note:
"Lads" in England are like "bros" in the United States. They prize male camaraderie, brotherhood if you will, and usually forge it through mutual suffering (i.e. sport, sport training, or extreme weather predicaments), alcohol consumption, and banter. See next note.

"To take the mick" out of someone is to make fun of them, usually with pithy one-liners and sarcastic questions (the collective body of which is known as "banter"). There is a ruder version of the same phrase, "to take the piss," but I gather that nice girls don't say that. So I won't.

So the lads took the mick out of me. How, you may ask, did I stumble into the crosshairs?

I almost made it too easy.
I quoted Eminem.

And because I've established quite a reputation for pop-cultural ignorance, one of them looked at me, astonished.

Lad 1: "You know who Eminem is?"
Me: "Of course I know who Eminem is."
Lad 1: "How? Did he record a country album?"
Me: "Just because I'm from Tennessee ---" At this point, I was interrupted with an impromptu Eminem-on-the-banjo routine, at which I laughed. And that's when the floodgates opened.

Lad 1: "What's it like in Tennessee? Like, in your house, do you all say good night to each other after you turn out the lights?"
Lad 2: "Do you use a pool table for your dinner table, and just put the utensils in the pockets?"
Lad 3: "If you want to watch TV, doesn't someone have to get on a bicycle to power a generator?"
Me: "Well, I usually go outside, put on the pair of shoes that the ten of us share, walk down the road to the gas station shack where we get our chickens fried, and ask the snuff-dipping man there to turn on the power for an hour so we can watch Little House on the Prairie. And that's our TV for the month."

Over the course of dinner, I realized that they had, at least in jest, cobbled together an impression of Tennessee from snippets of The Waltons, The Simpsons (in particular, Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel), John Wayne Westerns and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Which, when you think about it, is about as fair a list as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, Love Actually, and Oliver Twist.

My mom asked me later, "Wait - you didn't tell them what Tennessee was really like?"

Of course not. They were having far too much fun for me to have even a chance at setting the record straight. Heck, I was probably laughing the hardest.

Plus, saying, "Hang on, we've got the 42nd best public education system in the country!" doesn't really help your case when people are asking if you walk around with a wheat stalk shoved between your teeth.

I gathered, anyway, that the rules of banter are much like those of improv comedy: Say "Yes" to your partner; keep the scene going for as long as it will stay funny. There were five or so of these guys taking the mick, so the scene stayed funny for a good long while.

But I would like to apologize formally to those who feel I ought to have shown more Tennessee pride. I did my state no credit, unless you count fanning the flames of ridicule with an enthusiasm that equaled the lads'.

I think Tennessee can handle it. And so can I.

Say What?

In my own paltry way (since I've been reminded multiple times that Americans "can't speak proper English"), I have noticed a few new turns of phrase.

That is, I've been noticing little linguistic gems that Monty Python, Jane Austen, A Muppet Christmas Carol, and Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes did not prepare me to hear.

To wit: In America, if a task's outcome will not be worth the effort you put into it, you say it's "too much trouble." Or, if you're in Tennessee, you might say that "the juice ain't worth the squeeze." Problem solved. The phrases communicate that the job is too small to matter. Let's move on. What, then, shall we do?

In Britain, one says, "I can't be bothered." One utters it with a shrug, a chuckle, or an exasperated hands-in-the-air. The speaker's demeanor is humble enough; usually the phrase just signals a judicious bowing-out.

Here's my problem with the phrase: "can't be bothered" elevates the performer of the task. One suddenly thinks of all the things they have on their plate. Rather than the chore being too small, the person is too grand, too lofty.

It's a subtle change from "too much trouble" to "can't be bothered," but I'm still trying to work out why it unsettles me. Maybe it sets off my passive-aggression radar, like one might really be saying:

"I can't be bothered, I'm far too busy and important, please notice my furrowed brow and the way my neck hurts."

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. I'll definitely allow that possibility, since it won't be long before I'll probably not be able to be bothered myself.

One more, though, before I get too busy and my neck hurts:

If something is not appropriate, won't work, or won't aid the flourishing of society, the British say "that's not on." That's all. And in three words, they've earmarked a misstep, pointed out a vexing disregard for the Way Things Are Done, or exposed a revolting stray from decency.

I find it to be a gloriously efficient finger-wag at whatever needs condemning. I'm keeping it in my back pocket for the day my students really start swinging from the rafters.

Chasing Harry Potter

Before I detail another decadent adventure, a short story from my English classroom:

Me: I'm going to give each of you a card. Write down your name, your birthday, and your favorite book on the card.
Student: (Raises hand politely)
Me: Yes?
Student: Is Vogue a book?

Ah, children. Ever on the cutting edge.

Fortunately, I was able to spend the weekend in a booklover's mecca. Five of us, freed from Saturday class, took the student coach from school and traipsed around Oxford for the weekend.

We got to be the only patrons at an Indian restaurant in Jericho (a neighborhood slightly northwest of the main city center). We wrote postcards to friends and family. A few of us purchased the necessary Oxford-logo clothing to prove our travels, and of course yours truly just couldn't resist buying a book of poems at a shop on Broad Street called Blackwell's.

We explored everything on foot, and we were rewarded with a Saturday where the sun shone as we explored Christ Church Colllege, the Oxford Museum, and the Bodleian Library (really only the Divinity School examination room, but it was beautiful and historic and at least one scene from Harry Potter was filmed there).


On the drizzlier Sunday, we browsed the Ashmoleon museum of art and artifacts. I spent most of my time wandering around the Italian Renaissance exhibit, growing slightly weary of Madonnas-and-Children, but I perked up when, in the rooms dedicated to pre-Classical Aegea, I recognized names I had learned about in Greek Mythology class. Eventually, though, I faded and required a visit to the museum cafe.

It's hard not to feel like a museum dunce when you'd rather go to the cafe than look at another hunt scene or miniature sculpture of Hercules-in-combat-with-the-Nemean-Lion. But, as my mom would say, I'm a grown-ass woman. I could do as I liked. I sipped my latte with confidence.

When, with similar confidence, we were taking goofy pictures posing in the ramparts of New College, I remembered how I love for an old building to keep getting used.

As I loved the Dome Room at U.Va. for the dinners I ate there with the Guides, I admired the wood-panelled dining Hall at Christ Church for the bustling kitchen immediately adjacent. We wandered through C.S. Lewis's Magdalen College, and I loved glimpsing hideously patterned, fire-retardant curtains behind the old windows. Venerable though these buildings are, they mean nothing without the real, live students who are learning, eating, and setting things on fire there.

The banalities of undergraduate life could be seen nearly everywhere you looked.



An ivy-covered wall may loom over a courtyard, but at eye-level a grubby little placard reads "bicycles stored here will be confiscated." (For the record, Oxford is home to approximately 100,000 bicycles). The peace of a sunken garden (probably intended to encourage scholarly reflection) was broken by a guy in a sweatshirt singing "I'm Into Something Good" to himself as he slouched along. And at night, on the winding medieval mews that have been the thoroughfares of whip-smart dons and scholars for 800 years, girls in their shortest skirts and sky-high heels tottered along to a nightclub.

Try as I might to stick Oxford into another realm of contemplative integrity, it seems it will remain a colllege town. Well done, kids; I say well done. Keep the ole place on its toes.