Strolling along the street with my mate in Memphis, Tennessee a couple of years ago, we were stopped by a bloke and a girl in their 20s asking for directions. As soon as we opened our mouths the bloke said “I knew you were from Europe”. Well, he was half right: I’m from London and my mate’s from New Zealand but has lived in the UK for 10 years. We asked how he could tell, he said it was because we had our hands in our pockets [our own pokets, before anyone starts getting funny].
It doesn’t surprise me at all. One the other hand, I’ve no explanation.
I’ve worked in the past in a violin repair/dealer shop, which is in a beautiful square in a quaint town which attracts plenty of tourists. So we’re used to the cameras and so on. We developed the ability to identify nationalities before they walked through the door (they’d invariably spend time looking through the window first). I’ve no idea how it happened, but we could distinguish between the four most common groups, French, German, Belgian and Dutch, before they said a word.
yeah that’s true, there’s just some way you can tell. Its partly the clothing, partly the posture, or the way someone walks.
To me, Dutch people just have this attitude, or gezellig or whatever that just seems to show on their expressions. Its this weird, take everything as it comes, unfazed look. It looks like they are sizing everything up as quickly as possible.
I can’t imagine what people think about Americans. Its gotta be easy in most cases. When I lived in Europe, I could spot an American from a mile away. Normally by clothes, but also by their posture, body type, or maybe their faces or haircuts. But clothes are the number one factor. Even if you think that you dress pretty internationally, you’d be so surprised at the minute differences.
The Dutch spend some time looking through the window first, size everything up, walk away and unfazingly look into windows of other shops, come back and then ask: “Have you got anything less expensive?”
Not too hard, distinguishing a dutchie.
I can’t believe nobody has caught the glaring error made in the OP about Tony Blair - cited as typically “English.”
Blair is a Scot. Yes, he speaks with an almost perfect middle-class Estuary accent, but that is probably cultivated. (The very complex sociolinguistics of class and regional accents in England is best left for another thread.) I wonder if, when visiting close friends and family in Scotland, in private, when he’s had a few, his Scots accent is let loose.
The two basic types of English face that I’ve noticed are:
Dark, heavy browed, somewhat rounded face, widely set eyes. I think of this as descended from the prehistoric, pre-Celtic aboriginal peoples of Britain. Ringo Starr and Davy Jones are two of the strongest examples of this I can think of (but Jones is Welsh, right?). George Harrison and Kate Bush also. Phil Collins seems to have a milder version of this look. I imagine you find more of these the further west you go.
Light-complexioned, more square and Germanic looking. Like Sir Laurence Olivier, Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant. I think of this as the Saxon look. I guess more of them in the southeast and east.
