The hardest thing to cope with for an English learner of Swedish is not the
gender system in nouns, nor the
voiceless palatal-velar fricative, nor the
verb-second syntax. No, the toughest thing to learn is how to make do without a word for 'please'. I end up saying
Tack ('thank you') in all sorts of places, just in order to make some polite noise when I don't know what else to do.
How often one should thank others is something that differs from culture to culture, and something that people tend to notice as over- or under-present in cultures that are not their own. British expats in America are
often heard to say that they miss people saying
please and
thank you. For what it's worth, as an American in
Britain, I miss people saying (
AmE)
Excuse me or
sorry when they knock into me in shops or on the street. (Whenever my mother comes to England, she has cause to exclaim
But I thought the English were supposed to be polite!) The worst case of this involved a 9-year-old American guest who was shoved to the floor when she was unfortunate enough to get between a Londoner and an open Tube train door. There's no explaining away that kind of
behavio(u)r, that was just rude. Otherwise, my theory is that the reason that British people
apologi{s/z}e less often than Americans when they knock against you in a public place is that they're in denial about having made physical contact with a stranger. (See the discussion of notions of privacy in the comments back
here.)
One hears a lot more
thank yous in Britain during a typical exchange at a (
AmE)
store check-out counter/(
BrE)
shop till. Somehow, I've caught on to this, and when I'm working at the
charity shop/thrift store, I say
thank you when the customer gives me an item to ring up, when they give me their money, and at least once at the end of the transaction. The customer says
thank you at least when I give them their change and when I give them their purchase. So, that's a minimum of five
thank yous per transaction, but in real interactions, I've counted up to eight. An American encounter would typically have two or three, mostly toward(s) the end of the interaction, and would not include the initial thanks for putting the item-to-be-purchased on the counter. Perhaps because they say
thank you more, the British have more ways to give their thanks. One informal means of giving thanks is to say
ta, which the OED says is "An infantile form of ‘thank-you’, now also commonly in colloq. adult use." Another is
cheers (which is the word I started out intending to write about, since I had a request months ago from
Ben Zimmer).
Cheers is interesting because it is so flexible. In
AmE, it is simply used as a salutation in drinking (or sometimes with a mimed glass in hand, as a means of congratulations). In
BrE it has this use, but is also used to mean 'thank you', 'goodbye' or 'thanks and goodbye'. I first learned these uses of
cheers in South Africa, where my American colleague and I learned to pronounce it as
chizz, following the example of our South African colleague
Chaz (Charles). Using
cheers to simply mean 'goodbye' is probably more South African than British (the OED doesn't note this sense, and notes that the 'thank you' meaning is as recent as the mid-1970s), but I find it very useful for those situations in which one wants to close an e-mail with
thank you for something that hasn't been done yet. A British colleague noted recently noted with incredulity that Swedes often close e-mails with
thanks in advance, wondering whether that was a direct translation from Swedish. It is (
tack i förskott), but I had to point out that Americans write this too (whether or not we have knowledge of Swedish!), as we (or at least some of us) have been taught that it is presumptuous to thank someone for something they've been asked to do but haven't done yet. Since
cheers is ambiguous between
Hail, good person! and
Thank you!, I use it to express gratitude while avoiding the feeling that I'm breaking that letter-writing rule that I learned from Miss
Pitrella back in whatever grade/year that was. (If anyone is watching me from the Beyond, it's Miss
Pitrella.) However, it was Ben
Zimmer's impression that
cheers "always struck me as UK-derived, yet my sense is that in email context it's used more in the US than the UK." This is not my experience at all, but you can side with Ben in the comments if you like.
So, cheers from Sweden! Or as I tend to think of it, Heaven on Earth (at least when the weather is as gorgeous as it has been this week). Heading back to the UK tomorrow (which, according to the Swedish newspaper I was reading today, is
smutsig).
Postscript (the next morning): Woke up this morning
reali{s/z}
ing some the things I hadn't said in this post. One is that the reason why
please and
thank you are a little more important in Britain is that Britain is more on the 'deference' side and the US more on the 'solidarity' side on the scale of politeness systems. I discussed this a little back
here. This means that Americans start out assuming that
everyone's equal/friendly, whereas the British start out assuming some status distinctions between people, and therefore treat strangers (and expect to be treated by strangers) with a bit less familiarity and a bit more polite caution. (Note that this doesn't mean that there aren't big social differentiations in America--just that in many situations we feel it's more polite not to make a big deal of them.) This doesn't directly explain the lesser amount of
excuse me behavio(u)r when bumping into people, which is why I had to come up with my little theory above.
Another place where the English say
thank you more often is when travel(l)
ing by
bus or
coach (in
AmE, they're both
bus--we don't differentiate lexically between the cross-town and more comfy long-distance types). If the exit of the bus is by the driver's seat, then one says
thanks or
thank you to the driver. In
Watching the English (if I'm remembering correctly), Kate Fox describes this as insincere English
behavio(u)r. Personally, having heard American friendliness described as 'insincere' by many non-Americans, I have a real problem with outsiders describing others'
behavio(u)r as 'insincere'. (Kate Fox is an insider, but as an anthropologist, she was taking the outsider's role.) Non-Americans often say to me that they can't abide the insincere way in which Americans are so friendly and complimentary with people they don't even know. I don't think this is insincerity, but optimism and enthusiasm--which can seem unseemly in cultures in which earnestness is unseemly (see Kate Fox again).
I'll stop there before I write another post's worth!
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