British English has many phrases for complaining about a change while going along with it.
Here we go again: Another change has been announced, and it will be no better than the last one.
Typical: This was bound to go wrong.
What was wrong with the old one?: I do not see why this had to change.
Don’t get me started: I have complaints, and I am about to share them.
To have a good moan: To complain at length and feel better for it.
British English has many phrases that accept getting by without a perfect plan.
To muddle through: To succeed without a clear plan, by dealing with problems as they come.
To make do: To manage with what is available.
To wing it: To do something without preparation.
A bodge job: A rough repair that works well enough.
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it: We will deal with that problem if it happens.
Suck it and see: Try it and find out whether it works.
At work, British managers often give an instruction in the form of a question or a suggestion.
Shall we try it this way?: We are going to do it this way.
I wonder if you could…: Please do this.
It might be worth…: Do this.
Would you mind having a look at this?: Fix this.
Just a thought: This is a suggestion that I expect to be followed.
When you get a chance: Soon.
British English has many phrases that praise carrying on without fuss.
To keep a stiff upper lip: To hide distress and stay calm.
Mustn’t grumble: Things are not good, but I will not complain. It is a common answer to “How are things?”
To soldier on: To keep working despite difficulty or illness.
Grin and bear it: Accept an unpleasant situation without complaint.
It’s not the end of the world: This is bad, but we will manage.
Don’t make a fuss: Do not draw attention to the problem.
British English has many phrases that judge an action by whether it is fair.
It’s not cricket: It is unfair or dishonorable.
Fair play: Fair and honest behavior. Also said to give someone credit, as in “Fair play to her.”
Fair’s fair: The same rule must apply to everyone.
A fair crack of the whip: A fair chance.
To jump the queue: To get something before others who have waited longer.
To move the goalposts: To change the rules after a process has started.
In the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, the road sweeper Trigger is proud that he has used the same broom for 20 years. In that time, he explains, it has needed 17 new heads and 14 new handles.
The scene is from the episode “Heroes and Villains,” first broadcast on Christmas Day 1996. In Britain, “Trigger’s broom” is sometimes used as a name for an object whose parts have all been replaced but which is still treated as the original.
On 28 October 1943, Winston Churchill asked the House of Commons to rebuild its chamber, destroyed by bombing in 1941, on its old foundations. He told the House: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
He set two conditions. The new chamber should keep its old shape, “oblong and not semi-circular.” It should also “not be big enough to contain all its Members at once without over-crowding.”
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke wrote: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
In his essay “On Being Conservative,” published in 1956, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott described the conservative disposition. To be conservative, he wrote, is “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery.” The essay was later collected in his book Rationalism in Politics.
The Fabian Society, a socialist society that helped found the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. His nickname was Cunctator, “the Delayer.” The society chose a tortoise as its emblem, for a slow, almost unnoticed transition to socialism.
In 1923, the leading Fabian Sidney Webb gave the presidential address at the Labour Party conference. His phrase from that speech is usually quoted as “the inevitability of gradualness.”