Can You Pass As a Brit? Just Answer 3 Simple Questions

26 Nov 2015 • 9 minute read

It’s Thankgiving! Happy Thanksgiving if you are reading this on the day. Cadence is closed, of course. I’m working on blogs for next week (yeah, right). But I thought I’d put out a fun blog. This has nothing to do with EDA or the semiconductor ecosystem or even Cadence.

So a few years ago I saw an article by a guy who lives in London and has a lot of American friends. They like to think that they have gone native and know England (or maybe the UK, because they probably don’t know the difference) really well. So this guy devised a three-question test for Americans as to whether they could really say that they knew the country as well as the natives. Here they are:

What do the letters LBW stand for?
What happens on November 5^th and why?
What is Marmite and do you like it?

Don't read on immediately, try and answer the questions first.

So here are the answers.

LBW: It stands for Leg Before Wicket. It’s from cricket. You’ve heard of cricket, right? It is the summer sport. Sometimes it is described as the British equivalent of baseball, but that would technically be rounders, that is only played by girls in middle-school, with roughly the same rules. The ten-second summary of cricket is that the batsman has a bat like in baseball (not the same shape), and if ever the ball crosses home plate it hits an ancient wooden contraption, called the wicket, that collapses and you are out. There are two wickets, 22 yards apart (one chain in old units), and the equivalent of running around the bases is to run between them back and forth. You can also be caught out (just like in baseball) and run out (pretty much like failing to make a base). There are a few other weird ones but they are roughly the equivalent of the infield fly rule. Unlike in baseball the ball is bounced off the ground in front of the batter, and spinning the ball can be important (as any baseball pitcher will tell you, too).

So the obvious temptation is to block it with your (padded) leg. So being out LBW means that your leg blocked the ball and otherwise it would have hit the wicket. Leg Before Wicket. It is the most complicated rule in cricket because it has more exceptions than a Congressional tax regulation, and if you really want to know, Wikipedia has more, way more, than you will want to know.

November 5^th^: It’s fireworks day. We burn bonfires with effigies of a guy. Not a guy, but a Guy. The effigy is actually Guy Fawkes, whose stylized mask is the one used by Anonymous, via V for Vendetta. So why would we do that?

America lets off fireworks on July 4^th (plus new year, start of baseball season at the ballpark, and stuff). Independence Day. So when was the English Independence Day? We did actually have a revolution, known as the Glorious Revolution, and it has been very significant for the changes in the rule of law. In 1688, James II of England (James VII of Scotland, I told you didn’t know the difference between England and the UK) was overthrown. The Dutch invaded and William & Mary became monarchs (yes, the only time in UK history a husband and wife have been joint rulers).

James (and parliament) introduced a bill of rights declaring among a lot of other things, that:

the pretended power to dispense with Acts of Parliament is illegal;
the commission for ecclesiastical causes is illegal;
levying money without the consent of Parliament is illegal;
it is the right of the subject to petition the king and prosecutions for petitioning are illegal;
maintaining a standing army in peacetime without the consent of Parliament is illegal;
Protestant subjects "may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions, and allowed by law";
the election of MPs ought to be free; that freedom of speech and debates in Parliament "ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament";
excessive bail and fines not required and "cruel and unusual punishments" not to be inflicted;
jurors in high treason trials ought to be freeholders;
that promises of fines and forfeitures before conviction are illegal;
that Parliament ought to be held frequently.

You will note a lot of similarity to the US constitution and amendments. Many of these clauses, such as number 6, equivalent to the 2^nd amendment, still exist as freedoms in the US but no longer in Britain. Some phrases are copied verbatim such as “cruel and unusual punishment”. Number 10, no fines and forfeitures before conviction would be great in the US, too. It turns out that today the police seize more money without convicting people through civil forfeiture than the genuine thieves manage to get away with.

The similarity is not coincidental. The Federalist Papers and the anonymous people who wrote them (assumed these days to be Madison, Hamilton and Jay) were very influenced by this bill of rights.

William (and Mary) was only king (and queen) for a year, so the revolution didn’t lead directly to today, but it’s still regarded as a year on a par with Magna Carta (800^th anniversary this year) as a key event in changing the balance of power between king and people.

Since the most successful revolution we have had didn’t last, we let fireworks off on a failed one:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot
I know of no reason that gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

And it hasn’t been forgotten. So what was the gunpowder plot? On November 5^th 1605, it was a failed assassination attempt, led by Robert Catesby, against King James I of England (and VI of Scotland). He was not the James of the glorious revolution, the one before. The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the state opening of England's Parliament as the prelude to a popular revolt during which James's nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, would be installed as the Catholic head of state. Guy Fawkes had a lot of military experience and was in charge of the explosives, gunpowder, in the cellars under the Houses of Parliament (not the building you think of today, that was built in the 1800s). But an anonymous letter revealed the plot and Guy Fawkes was captured. He was tried and executed. They decided to behead him, but since they’d already executed him, they had to dig him up again to do so.

And on every November 5^th, bonfires are burned all over England and fireworks are set off to commemorate defeating this plot. Although to be honest, i expect most people just know that firework’s night is November 5^th without a clue why. It is getting less like that these days since fireworks are pretty dangerous, I’m not sure you can even buy them privately any more, and Halloween has become a thing just a week earlier (American import). But every schoolchild can, I hope, tell you the Remember, remember, the 5^th of November rhyme.

Marmite: It is a yeast extract that looks like tar. I kid you not. It tastes either wonderful or not, depending on whether you started to eat it as a toddler or not. Very salty, looks disgusting, but I love it. The Australian equivalent is called Vegamite, but it isn’t as good, IMHO.

The second part of the question is semi-important. No-one who has ever tried Marmite for the first time as an adult has ever liked it (I exaggerate probably, but not by much).

In England, the classic way for a child to eat a boiled egg for breakfast is toast with butter and Marmite, cut into thin strips (called “soldiers”) that you dip in the soft yolk. Then you use your spoon to take out the hard white. My mouth is watering.

The Fourth Question

On to the fourth question for anyone who is so bored on Thanksgiving that they have read this far. What would be the equivalent questions in the US that anyone brought up here would have no problem answering but that people who have lived here for only a couple of years but think they have “gone native” would struggle to answer?

The best “equivalent” questions I could come up with, just going with the same basic format, are:

What do the letters RBI stand for?
What is root beer and do you like it?
No idea for a date question. Bueler? Bueler?

The first one is pretty equivalent, a somewhat obscure reference from a sport that is so mainstream that even people who don’t follow it are vaguely aware of it. Like cricket.

I think everyone knows what root beer is but to me, and most people not brought up on it, it tastes disgusting. Too sweet and too bitter at the same time. Barman, bring me a negroni. Oh wait…isn’t that too sweet and too bitter, too?

I can’t think of a date though, that Americans know what it is but someone who immigrated (and that includes me so maybe why I can’t think of one) would not.

However, maybe there are better questions than just trying to pick American equivalents of the British ones. Good hunting ground would be the stuff that American schoolkids are forced to read. I have read To Kill a Mockingbird (voluntarily) but I have no idea about Why the Caged Bird Sings or what is special about The Color Purple.

So if you are really reading this on Thanksgiving, then Happy Thanksgiving. More likely it is afterwards, in which case I hope you had a wonderful time with your friends and family. My daughter’s boyfriend is a Michelin-starred chef, I think our food should be more than OK. My daughter was a bar-manager and sommelier and now works in the spirits industry. I think the wine will be fine, too.

Trivia fact of the day. Mailboxes in UK display the initials of the monarch when they were created. It is, after all, the Royal Mail. So in England anything except the most ancient have E II R. She’s been the monarch for longer than anyone. But in Scotland they have just E R, because Elizabeth I (of England) never ruled Scotland. So just like James VI of Scotland was James I of England, Elizabeth II of England is Elizabeth I of Scotland. Go have another glass of wine and talk to your black-sheep uncle, it’s Thanksgiving.

Second trivia fact of the day. I mentioned a chain, 22 yards, the length of a cricket pitch. A furlong (still used in the UK in horse racing and maybe other places) is 1/8 of a mile, 220 yards. An acre is a chain by a furlong, 4480 square yards, the amount a horse could supposedly plough in a day.