[pasabagi]

Dunno how english Big Ben is. It was built in a made-up architectural style because it was supposed to be 'english' but england didn't really have much of an architectural culture.

Also dunno about double-entendre. Seems a little bit depressing to me that a woman struggles through sexism to provide a life-saving invention then it ends up getting made into a vagina joke.

For the record, am English.

[toyg]

Unless you think of another country when you look at the clock hosted in a tower named after an English Queen that only exists in the English capital, or when you hear his distinctive gong that happens to introduce several broadcasts originating from such capital, I’d say Big Ben is pretty English, whether you appreciate it or not. But I’m sure opinions on this are divided. /s

It’s also sad that you cannot appreciate an intelligent form of art that is not, in itself, sexist. There are plenty of plays, films, and tv series, where the double-entendre is “pushed” by women (x) , and there are plenty of women who thoroughly enjoy the practice (x) (I’d argue most, but maybe I just move in working-class circles). I’m sure that, if you dig in the annals of engineering, sooner or later you’ll find something nicknamed after penis jokes. Is that sad? It’s just humans being humans.

(X) fnarr fnarr!

[pasabagi]

There's nothing more german than oktoberfest, nothing more american than wearing a pair of star-spangled-banner trousers while shooting an assault rifle at a bald-headed eagle, and nothing more british than 'elisabeth tower'[1], named after a woman who's entire family tree consisted of french people that hanged a lot of english peasants.

That and the picture of Lord Kitchener, maybe with a cup of tea and a really shit cupcake.

[1] PS: I can see it's very authentically english that everybody corrected me on this. I can just imagine the conversation at a pub, with me trying to work out how to escape through methods short of suicide.

[toyg]

> a woman who's entire family tree consisted of french people

Actually, a woman whose family tree is almost entirely composed of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian people. No doubt they hanged quite a few English peasants too, after being literally invited to rule over the country; but, you know, pedantry and all that.

I understand the sentiment, but I would counter: there is nothing more British than turning something utterly non-British into a symbol of britishness (fancy some tea?), so trying to measure purity in this field is not very productive.

[pasabagi]

I'd say that Britain never really had a nationalist movement, because it had its anti-monarchist revolution before nations really existed, and basically became an empire at the same moment in time. So there was never really a great drive to invent a unifying British identity (compared to, say, 'Frenchness' or 'Germanness') - past the stuff that people sell to tourists, like red buses and policemen that let pregnant women piss in their helmets.

So since the empire collapsed after WW2, everybody has been casting around for some kind of identity, more and more frantically as more and more bits of the empire have sloughed off. Since Brexit, it's got a bit weird, with all politicians making all statements in front of massive union jacks, and I expect it will get weirder still when Scotland leaves.

Hopefully, the national conversation will arrive at the conclusion that heterogeneity is no bad thing, and we should simply devolve power (cultural as well as economic) to a local level rather than trying to enforce a kind of Disneyfied Boris-Johnson style 'Britishness' on everybody, but I'm not holding my breath.

[toyg]

I disagree. There used to be a very distinctive British identity, mostly associated with English upper-class ideals. The lower classes were periodically coopted into this identity, either after the industrial revolution that triggered mass-education or during periodic conflicts, and their aspirations were then pushed outward to colonize “inferior” people. This is how the British empire was built, and it definitely was nationalistic in outlook.

Of course, the mechanism eventually broke, because of the slaughter of WW1 put the lie to the dream and the rise of continent-sized superpowers put it materially out of reach. Since then, coopting lower classes into upper-class ideals has been unfeasible. A replacement emerged in the heyday of socialist movements (everyone eating the same food, working in the same factories), but then died off, as that way of life also disappeared. What followed is not homogeneous, I agree on that, but I think you’re discounting the strength of what was there before.

[TheManInThePub]

> Dunno how english Big Ben is. It was built in a made-up architectural style

Ummmm

Big Ben is the bell in the Elizabeth Tower. It was made in the Whitechapel bell foundry and could not be more English!

> a woman struggles through sexism to provide a life-saving invention then it ends up getting made into a vagina joke.

The joke is that the joke is wholly [1] in the dirty mind of the listener. I find it very odd having to explain this to somebody from the UK.

[1] Fnarr Fnarr!

[mnw21cam]

Not only could it not be more English, but it couldn't be more distinctively English. It's the only bell in the world that sounds quite like that, due to the fact that they hit it with too big a hammer in September 1859, and had to cut a hole around the resulting crack to stop it spreading.

[pasabagi]

While people in england do make a lot more jokes than people elsewhere, the average sense of humour is no better.