‘I may be gone some time’ – the British art of understatement
Dear all,
It’s been English Enrichment Week and in Monday’s assembly we considered how – and why – the traditional – and long-standing – British tendency for understatement may be disappearing from our vocabulary. There are many famous examples of this British understatement.
The missionary doctor David Livingstone was famous for exploring Africa in the late 19th Century. In 1873, he was suffering from pneumonia, malaria, and foot ulcers so bad that he could barely walk. The heat was unbearable, his porters left him, and he had been forced to pull out most of his rotting teeth. He was also suffering from a huge blood clot that would shortly kill him. In his tent, by the light of a candle, Livingstone picked up his pen and, using berry juice because he had run out of ink, he wrote the words: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’
The year 1912 provided two other famous examples of British understatement – Cosmo Duff-Gordon was one of the survivors when the Titanic sank in April 1912, describing the ordeal as ‘a rather serious evening’. This was the same disaster that saw the band continue to play on the deck of the stricken ship as it sank beneath the waves. ‘And the Band Played on‘, the headlines reported.
In the same year, Robert Scott led his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Having been beaten to the pole by a rival Norwegian expedition, the five-strong party all later perished during the return journey. In March 1912, Captain Titus Oates famously left the tent in which they were sheltering so that his comrades would have a better chance of living, and – as he left – famously said ‘I am just going out and maybe some time.’ Meanwhile, Scott himself subsequently wrote a note in his diary to his wife, in full knowledge that he was going to die, ‘We are in a very tight corner., I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly as I am sure you will.’
None of these men seem to have been courting sympathy but rather reflecting the British tendency to resist the temptation to be too earnest, gushing, or overly emotional, or even find humour in adversity.
The British tendency towards understatement is also something that many visitors to the UK find bewildering and there have been times when it has led to disaster. In 1951, 650 soldiers of the Gloucestershire Regiment were surrounded by an entire Chinese division on the Imjin River in Korea. Their commander, Brigadier Thomas Brodie, stated in a message to their American allies that ‘things are pretty sticky’. In the language of British understatement, this was effectively an emergency SOS call but to the Americans who received the message, it seemed as though the situation wasn’t too bad. The British were left to fight on without reinforcements, and only 40 survived.
However, this aspect of the English language seems to be disappearing. This has been seen with the decline in ‘gradable’ adverbs. In the past a terrible and painful illness used to be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance‘; a truly horrific experience would be ‘not exactly what I would have chosen‘; a sight of breathtaking beauty would be described as ‘quite pretty‘; and an act of terrible cruelty as ‘not very friendly‘. In recent years, however, such descriptions have become far less commonplace. This is partly due to the influence of American dialect, where emotion and hyperbole are more common, and partly because of social media, where the more dramatic the language used, the more views, likes and reposts will follow.
Is it a good or a bad thing that our use of the English language seems to be changing in this way? On the whole, is it better to keep emotions in check and downplay our language, or is it better to emphasise, exaggerate and dramatise when describing the things we’ve heard or seen? Like most things, the answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes, but I do think the trend to exaggerate that now dominates our world is – to use another classic British understatement – less than ideal.
Have a good weekend
Best wishes
Michael Bond
