Bill Bryson,for example, concludes that the English weather is not at all fascinating, and that our“addiction” to it is therefore very difficult to explain: “To an outsider,the most striking thing about the English weather is that there is not very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger—tornados, monsoons, hailstorms—are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles.”
Jeremy Paxman takes offence at Bryson's comments and argues that the English weather is truly fascinating:
Bryson misses the point. The interest is less in the phenomena themselves, but in uncertainty... one of the few things you can say about England with absolute certainty is that it has a lot of weather. It may not include tropical cyclones but life at the edge of an ocean and the edge of a continent means you can never be entirely sure what you're going to get.
My research has convinced me that both Bryson and Paxman are missing the point, which is that our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all:English weatherspeak is a form of code, developed to help us overcome our natural reserve (含蓄) and actually talk to each other. Everyone knows, for example, that “Nice day, isn't it?”, “Oh, isn't it cold?”; and other variations on the theme are not requests for weather data: they are greetings or conversationstarters. In other words, English weatherspeak is a form of “cleaning talk”—the human equivalent of what is known as “social cleaning” among our primate(灵长类的)cousins, where they spend hours cleaning each other's fur, even when they are perfectly clean, as a means of social connection.
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