Culture And Climate: Great Britain

[The Mad Monk]

How much of British culture (attitudes, food, architecture, music, literature, etc.) is due to century upon century of perpetually dreary, depressing weather?

[The Mad Monk]

Clearly it has rendered them apathetic regarding their own culture.

[Whaleboy]

Why?

[The Mad Monk]

The ancient question.

[Paul Hanson]

We have a hell of a lot of words for rain, but that's about it.

[Drake Tungsten]

Much like the Eskimos...

[FrustratedPoet]

Do Eskimos have a lot of words for rain?

[Drake Tungsten]

Yes. Dare you challenge my extensive knowledge of Inuit vocabulary?

[Bosh]

No, but I do

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.
Where did this myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually studied the Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages spoken from Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura Martin has documented how the story grew like an urban legend, exaggerated with each retelling. In 1911 Boas casually mentioned that Eskimos used four unrelated word roots for snow. Whorf embellished the count to seven and implied that there were more. His article was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and popular books on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in other textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who popularized Martin's article in his essay "The Great Eskimo Vocabularly Hoax," speculates about why the story got so out of control: "The alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facts of their polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwing Grandma out to be eaten by polar bears." It is an ironic twist. Linguistic relativity came out of the Boas school, as part of a campaign to show that nonliterate cultures were as complex and sophisticated as European ones. But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other cultures' psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own. (p. 64)

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/derrida/eskimos.html

[Drake Tungsten]

Damn you, Boshko!

[Solly]

We don't have a culture and our climate is just weather. In 32 of the last 100 years, we've had a day in January warmer than the coolest day in July.

[Sandman]

How much of British culture (attitudes, food, architecture, music, literature, etc.) is due to century upon century of perpetually dreary, depressing weather?

None.

[Traianvs]

Originally posted by Sandman


None.

well, british architecture in general is rather depressing actually, but that's just how I perceive it. Of course, I always see Britain in all its glory (=> rain) and perhaps that rain accentuates that depressing feeling

[The Viceroy]

You only have to look to how brits act when they do get the sun on them, to understand that its probably a good job that the UK climate is as it is ..

To be fair .. I think weather does play a part in a nations culture, however I don't believe that it should be overstated. The main influence on the culture here has been immigration, over centuries, even millenia ..

The UK's favourite food for example, has everything to do with our colonial past and immigration.

Many of our traditions come from colonialism, and id say that had a much larger impact on the UK than the weather does.

Religion came from Roman influences.

Saying that, you could argue that the reason the UK was so desperate to have colonies, was because of the weather here in the first place .. but im sure it had more to do with wealth, power and beating the French.

Because we are so influenced by the influx of immigrants, I can see that the next 20 years holds many many more radical changes in the culture of these isles ..

[CerberusIV]

Britain doesn't have a culture and arguably never has had one, it just goes out and borrows bits of other cultures. The weather is an incentive to go and do something to cheer yourself up, like copy a good curry recipe, or drink a lot of alcohol - both things Britons are prone to doing.

Why anyone would want to move to this country is beyond me. I'm more interested in leaving.