Do biritish people really talk that polite IRL all the time? If someone would always talk like that I would seem very fake and off to me and make me very suspicious. The only times I expressed myself like that was in university application letters.
I wish someone would do a Scottish or Australian version of PHP complete with swear words. I'd pay good money for that (I have my Alexa set to Aussie, totally worth it).
I'd say the self-deprecating humour is also a mainstay of the Brits, encompassing almost all social classes. Granted, I'm not a Brit, but a former boss of mine (I'd also call him a friend) was a Brit and he checked all the stereotypes related to that. Really great guy.
They (the Brits) used to also be renowned for their black humour, at least around these parts of the European continent, but I feel that that is beginning to fade out (maybe it has become too culturally sensitive to joke about death? I wouldn't know)
No, no-one talks like that, and also "British people" don't really talk the same way even from one town to the next. There's not really any such thing as a "British accent".
You know how different a New Englander talks from a Texan? That's how different someone from Glasgow sounds compared to someone from Edinburgh, or someone from Manchester compared to someone from Birmingham.
I can tell the difference between New England and Florida but it isn't quite in the same league.
E.g. Austronesian is a huge language family that covers an enormous geographic area including Hawaii, the Philippines, Indonesia and even as far as Madagascar, and it contains over 1,000 distinct languages divided into 9 subfamilies - and yet all but one of those subfamilies are found exclusively in Taiwan, where proto-Austronesian first emerged roughly 5000 years ago.
The other side of the same humor is re-writing everything with "oi, c*nt, over here, you c****sucker"
Aaaand I think it's the same people :)
Maybe you've heard that the western attitude of smiling for no good reason is strange for Eastern Europeans but this is not like that and you can actually quickly internalise the general politeness of daily interactions. I like it a lot but sometimes can come up as unauthentic, you feel the authenticity when they start using sarcasm.
Brits will kill me for this, but it's more of an European thing - the Brits just preserved it a bit more aggressively than others, because they never actually abolished the aristocratic system that generated it.
We do love deliberate understatement, evasion and saying please a lot though!
British politeness is not based on hierarchy, but based on (sometimes excessive) apologising for inconvenience.
Not true. Go to Eastern Europe and see. You'll get much less unintentional smiles or politeness than in the UK.
Oh oh, "yes true", and your note confirms it... What did Eastern Europe aggressively do, in the last century? Destroy aristocracy. So they are at the opposite end of that particular scale.
Well, I wasn't a big fan of it, but the reality of the matter is... for most of us, someone else destroyed our aristocracy (and all of our intelligentsia with it) for us.
It's that or cockney. Those are literally your only options if you want anyone from the UK to understand you.
Source: I wrote it :)
Something that's struck me about the country is how much the way you talk reflects where you are from and your station in life. Like not just which region, there's frequently dialects/sociolects for different parts of a city.
People who speak Received Pronunciation (RP) may speak more in this way (look up Jacob Rees-Mogg if you really want to see how stupid it sounds) but they are a small minority of the British people.
Personally my go-to for RP would be Trevor McDonald.
However, RP can sound a bit silly with some pronunciations. The same is true with any accent.
Must be an age thing.
What bothers me is the emergence over the last 10 or 15 years is the new London accent that was previously Thames Estaury in the 90s and before that an actual bona fide London accent that my grandparents had.
The new accent is typified by -ah or -ar instead of -er.
The police recruitment adverts being the best example. Become a police office-aah instead of police office-er.
It wasn't really, though - it was just the first one you heard. Accents are always in flux.
(An interesting comparison for me is the Sex Pistols' car crash Bill Grundy interview against a modern London yoof accent. Major, major change just within my lifetime).
Folks might note 'In the 2010 book Stab Proof Scarecrows by Lance Manley, it was surmised that "chav" was an abbreviation for "council housed and violent"'.