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How Not to Be Clever

"You foreigners are so clever," said a lady to me some years ago. First I considered this remark exaggerated but complimentary. Since then I have learnt that it was far from it. These few words expressed the lady's contempt and slight disgust for foreigners.

If you look up the word "clever" in any English dictionary, you will find that dictionaries are out of date and mislead you on this point. According to the "Pocket Oxford Dictionary", for instance, the word means quick and neat in movement ... skilful, talented, ingenious. All nice adjectives, expressing valuable and estimable characteristics. A modern Englishman, however, uses the word "clever" in the sense: shrewd, sly, furtive, surreptitious, treacherous, sneaking, crafty, un-English, un-Scottish, un-Welsh.

In England it is bad manners to be clever. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a different opinion. A continental gentleman seeing a nice panorama may remark: "This view rather reminds me of Utrecht, where the peace treaty concluding the War of Spanish Succession was signed on the 11th April, 1713. The river there, however, recalls the Guadalquivir, which rises in the Sierra de Cazorla and flows southwest to the Atlantic Ocean and is 650 kilometres long."

This pompous, showing-off way of speaking is not permissible in England. The Englishman is modest and simple. He uses but few words and expresses so much — but so much — with them. An Englishman looking at the same view would remain silent for two or three hours and think about how to put his profound feeling into words. Then he would remark: "It's pretty, isn't it?"

An English professor of mathematics would say to his maid checking up the shopping list: "I'm no good at arithmetic, I'm afraid. Please correct me, Jane, if I am wrong, but I believe that the square root of 97344 is 312."

And about knowledge. An English girl, of course, would be able to learn just a little more about, let us say, geography. But it is just not "chic" to know whether Budapest is the capital of Romania, Hungary or Bulgaria. And if she happens to know that Budapest is the capital of Romania, she should at least be perplexed if Bucharest is mentioned suddenly.

It is so much nicer to ask, when someone speaks of Barbados or Fiji: "Oh those little islands... Are they British?" (They usually are.)