United Kingdom, Relationships, Gradual Closeness

The Vocabulary of Reserve

British English has many phrases for keeping a polite distance, and for closing it too fast.

To keep oneself to oneself: To be friendly but private, and to share little about one’s life.

A private person: Someone who does not talk about home or feelings at work.

Over-familiar: Too friendly, too soon.

Too much information: Said, often as TMI, when someone shares a personal detail that nobody wanted to hear.

To warm to someone: To start to like someone, slowly.

To break the ice: To make the first small, easy contact with a stranger.

In October 1949, Helene Hanff, a writer in New York, wrote to Marks & Co., antiquarian booksellers at 84 Charing Cross Road in London. The replies came from Frank Doel, the shop’s chief buyer. As the writer Maggie Fergusson describes them, his letters began “Dear Madam” and were “cautious almost to the point of curtness.”

Hanff teased him, and over the years his letters became less formal. Doel’s colleagues and family began to write to her too, and she sent food parcels to postwar London. The correspondence lasted twenty years, until Doel died in December 1968. Hanff published it in 1970 as 84, Charing Cross Road.

Reginald

Jeeves, the valet in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse, first appeared in 1915. The premise of the stories is that the brilliant valet is firmly in control of the life of his young employer, Bertie Wooster.

Readers did not learn Jeeves’s first name until Much Obliged, Jeeves, published in 1971. A man named Bingley greets him with “Hullo, Reggie.” Bertie, the narrator, is “stunned by the revelation that Jeeves’s first name was Reginald.” He adds: “It had never occurred to me before that he had a first name.”

My Dear Watson

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes speaks to his friend as “my dear Watson,” “my boy” or “my dear boy.” Watson answers with “old man.”

Watson’s first name is mentioned on only four occasions in the stories.

No Kisses at Work

A survey by the job site Totaljobs, reported in June 2019, found that 76 percent of UK workers want less physical contact at work. Twenty-seven percent want workplace kisses banned. Forty-one percent prefer no physical contact when they greet colleagues or clients.

Making Friends in the UK

In the Expat Insider survey by InterNations for 2021, 37 percent of expats in the UK said they find it difficult to make new friends there. The figure across all countries in the survey was 32 percent.

The After-Work Drink

An online poll of more than 1,600 workers by the job site Monster, reported in Britain in October 2007, found that only 17 percent socialize with colleagues at least once a week.

Good Neighbors

In September 2015, YouGov found that only one in four British people would call their neighbors good friends. Sixty-five percent said that none of their neighbors are good friends. Among people over 60, the share who would call a neighbor a good friend rose to 44 percent.

There to Do a Job

In January 2019, a survey commissioned by the telecoms company 4Com found that three quarters of UK workers have turned a professional relationship into a lifelong friendship.

The survey also asked why some people do not form friendships at work. The most common answer, given by 39 percent, was that they are there to do a job, not to make friends.