Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The perfect gift for your (clueless) man



According to Kate Fox's anthropological studies of the English, we English men compound the emotional cluelessness apparently universal in our sex with the particular social dis-ease of our tribe. (Was Shakespeare really an Italian woman?)

This makes us hard to understand, since we have only three emotions--surprise, anger, and elation (as when our team scores a goal)--and all three are expressed in the same way, with expletives. This makes it hard sometimes to tell which is which.

Naturally, we share the general male inability to decipher indirect expressions of emotion by females. This is doubly disabling since all emotion is expressed indirectly in England. Frankly saying what you mean is frowned on for both sexes. In any case, a man should know what his woman means when she says the opposite (another of Fox's rules of English behavior--it's called irony).

But according to this little message, help is on the way. Perhaps the institution of marriage can be saved after all. Merry Christmas!

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