Observations of people
Mar. 31st, 2006 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
king_pellinorSmall children are unsettling, when they're too small for you to have deliberately confusing conversations with them, or to break by inducing them to run into walls. What are you supposed to do with them, when LadyofAstolat stops you singing songs to them and all the books have been read a dozen times? Bigger ones are better. Kargicq, Neuromancer, Skordh, Polly et al take note: please ensure we have improvements in size over the next few years.
"Watching the English" by Kate Fox is a fascinating book, but I think the concluding diagram suffers from being shoehorned into a nice neat format (core plus three sets of three elements). I think that the things Fox identifies are broadly correct, but incomplete. In particular, she identifes outlooks, reactions and desirables, but completely ignores undesirables; I think the avoidance of prominence and embarrassment is a key feature of English behaviour. This would only really fit into her scheme as being part of the desirability of moderation, but I think this understates the importance of the matter.
I may be swayed here by the video I have seen (as part of my office fire marshal training) of the Woolworths fire in which the deaths of several people were largely due to not wanting to be embarrassed by being seen to leave the café without paying. There's also the one where people studiously ignore a fire in a shop until someone finally cracks and apologetically points it out, at which point everyone else is reassured that they won't look odd if they admit to seeing it themselves.
"Watching the English" by Kate Fox is a fascinating book, but I think the concluding diagram suffers from being shoehorned into a nice neat format (core plus three sets of three elements). I think that the things Fox identifies are broadly correct, but incomplete. In particular, she identifes outlooks, reactions and desirables, but completely ignores undesirables; I think the avoidance of prominence and embarrassment is a key feature of English behaviour. This would only really fit into her scheme as being part of the desirability of moderation, but I think this understates the importance of the matter.
I may be swayed here by the video I have seen (as part of my office fire marshal training) of the Woolworths fire in which the deaths of several people were largely due to not wanting to be embarrassed by being seen to leave the café without paying. There's also the one where people studiously ignore a fire in a shop until someone finally cracks and apologetically points it out, at which point everyone else is reassured that they won't look odd if they admit to seeing it themselves.
