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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4782 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Are Brits on average more intelligent than Americans, at least verbally (restricting both sets to college-educated people, say)? As an American I know I might be conditioned by silly tropes of British sophistication but I feel like there's something here.

  • Based on what Youtube serves up to me occasionally, British talk shows seem more clever
  • Prime Minister's Questions, despite being nonsense, seem to require more quick-wittedness than any comparable American political event I can think of
  • Social customs seem to require saying lots of things in subtler, more roundabout ways, which is simply more mentally taxing for both the speaker and listener

Not that any of these are amazing displays of intelligence. There just seems to be a greater demand on one's verbal faculties in everyday life.

A big difference between Americans and Europeans is how we view Brits. If your image of Brits is upper class posh people you are American.

If you associate Brits with obese football hooligans causing a scene at a McDonalds at 3 am you are European.

I couldn't put it better. There is a ton of videos and memes mocking the dullness, meaninglessness, and poor quality of life of British lower classes.

On the other hand, Brits seem to me to have many of the smartest white people, with exemplars like Paul Dirac, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Roger Penrose or Timothy Gowers, so the differences are indeed significant.

The British lower classes were thoroughly pwned, as the kids would say. They don't even aspire to rise in the social classes. It is looked down upon to try. I wonder if this is a very long lasting heritage from what the Normans did to the Anglo-Saxons after conquering England. The latter were deeply subjugated, starved, massacred; put in their place. You can see the legacy in the way the language is organized. The words that describe things that are served to a nobler person, or are found in the house, or take place within the house, are French in origin. The words that describe the outside locations, the fields and the work and the serving, etc, are Anglo-Saxon in origin.

The legacy of the Norman conquest is so significant it is in many ways more similar to what happened in Latin America than other European countries. The upper classes are phenotypically distinct; in the northeast the working class sometimes has a quasi-nordic phenotype, otherwise they are shorter, more squat, have rounder faces.

I know what you're talking about, but I'm confused about Norman vs Nordic phenotypes. Aren't the Normans also Nordic? I'm also not clear what it means when I see very thin faces with fine features, which showed up a lot in old royal portraits.

The Normans are Nordic, unlike the vast majority of the working class. But in the Northeast (Newcastle is an example) one does see working class people with more of that phenotype, taller, blonder, lighter eyes etc.

I would assume the majority of the working class are mostly Anglo-Saxon genetically, which is probably going to be very similar to having Nordic DNA. They're both originally northwestern Germanic peoples. OTOH I could be under-estimating the Celtic component among non-upper class Brits.

It appears as though the modern English are less than 50% Anglo-Saxon, having been diluted through sustained contact and population exchange with France, presumably as a result of the Norman conquest and through migrant populations such as the Huguenots.

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