Differences and Similarities

After publishing yesterday’s post, it occurred to me that there was some irony to the fact that I spend so much time highlighting the things that make Brazilians distinctive, yet when (some) Brazilians finally agree (“only in Brazil”), I go and say that they’re actually the same as the rest of us!

It got me thinking about how we view our differences and similarities and how language affects our perception of what someone is saying. People generally feel positive when you highlight differences with words like interesting, distinctive and unique but feel negative about words like odd, strange and weird. The flip-side of this linguistic coin comes when you highlight similarities: normal, consistent, dependable are positive, but generic, homogeneous, conventional might not sound so good (-“What do you think of my new shirt?” -“Wow! It’s really, er, generic…”).

Thinking along these lines, I remembered something I saw a little while back:

 This is an excerpt of a speech given in 1965 by a Dutch physicist, Hendrik Casimir, in which he describes the way that English speakers (particularly the English!) find differences where others look for the similarities. Also, sorry to be a nerd, but don’t you just love that old typeface?

I found this in an e-Book called A Random Walk in Science and it made me chuckle, especially the (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek arrogance of the Englishman – imagine going through life explaining your actions like that! “I’m doing it this way because that is the way it should be done!”. Later on he gives another example – that continental Europeans consider the British Isles to be part of Europe, whereas the British commonly speak of “Europe and the British Isles” – and his main point is that the structure of English reflects (or perhaps even drives) this obsession with differences.

It occurred to me that when writing about my experiences in Rio, I am always highlighting the things that strike me as unusual – looking for the differences like a true anglophone I suppose. Nine times out of ten, the differences I describe are positive – distinctive rather than weird.

Interestingly, when I do mention something not 100% positive, one of the most common responses I get is “Sure, but that happens in plenty of other countries!”. Given my predilection for going on about differences, I suppose I can’t complain!

I’m not sure I believe that this is really an English trait – surely everyone is interested in the differences aren’t they? What do you think?

I’ll leave you with another little piece from that e-Book regarding the extremely important distinction we Brits make between Jam and Marmalade.