Culture

In a Word: Exceptionalism

Fetishistic penchant for queueing exemplifies English sense of exceptionalism

Patsy McGarry's face
Patsy McGarry
Sat May 30 2020 - 00:30

We hear soooo much about English exceptionalism these days. How great they art stuff, etc. So we have Brexit, trailing clouds of misery where this island is concerned. They don’t care.

And then that deliberate ‘we-know-better-than-WHO’ when it came to addressing the impending Covid-19 catastrophe earlier this year.

At least where the latter was concerned trauma dictated otherwise, if late in the day. The cloud of a cliff-edge Brexit, however, continues to brood over us here on what to England still is, clearly, the lesser island.

Even allowing for the above, however, probably the most irritating example of English exceptionalism where we on this island are concerned has to be the penchant of our neighbours for queueing.

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The English have made it into a fetish. They can’t help themselves.

One of the best examples of this, from memory, was a riot in London’s Tottenham some years ago. It had remained at the back of my mind, so I went researching. Here is a report from the riot in August 2011.

"The Metropolitan Police said it was focused on containing violent disorder in Tottenham on Saturday night, which left dozens of officers injured and saw squad cars, shops and flats burned to the ground. But its tactics meant gangs of youths were free to break into stores at nearby Tottenham Hale retail park and in Wood Green, with looters forming an orderly queue in broad daylight to steal from a sports shop."

Can you believe that? Thieves queueing to rob a shop! Only next door. Obviously not even a riot can quench the English instinct for “forming an orderly queue”.

Sadly for us it is not an Irish passion, which is why so many on this island have found so much queueing outside supermarkets, pharmacies, other shops, etc, over recent weeks such a trial.

But we’re stuck with it for now.

We must learn to adapt to this English way. But it is unlikely we ever will share their passion for forming orderly lines, wherever. It has, after all, been claimed they would form an orderly queue at the gates of hell.

Even the word ‘queueing’ itself inspires something less than affection. How could you care for its eight letters, which includes five vowels in sequence, with two repeated?

Exceptionalism from Anglo-French excepcioun, Latin exceptionem, derived from excipere, 'to take out'.

inaword@irishtimes.com

Wood Green