The Regal Rules for Girls by Jerramy Fine Read Free Book Online

movie of all time. It’s based on George Bernard Shaw’s play
Pygmalion
and is the story of an impoverished young girl named Eliza Doolittle (played by Audrey Hepburn) who sells flowers on the dirty streets of London. When a wealthy linguistic professor named Henry Higgins hears her piercingly crass working-class accent (sounds “like chickens cackling in barn,” he says, “I’d rather hear a choir singing flat”), he makes a bet with a friend that a few weeks of speech coaching is all it will take to pass off this “guttersnipe” as a duchess. Eliza agrees to participate in this wager, and by the end of the movie everyone at the Embassy Ball is convinced that she is of royal blood. And Henry falls in love with her of course. But the most important part is that everyone thinks she’s royal just because her accent changed, when only months ago she was a common ruffian living on the streets.
    Excessive childhood viewings of
My Fair Lady
actually proved to be an invaluable education for me when it came to understanding the intricacies of the English class system, and the knowledge I gleaned from it served me well when I arrived in London. I advise you to watch it and learn. (And I promise, by the end of the movie, you’ll find yourself happily humming the soundtrack.)
    R ECOMMENDED R EADING:
    Watching the English
by Kate Fox
    This endlessly entertaining book observes the British with a sharp, anthropological eye, as if they were animals in the wild. Breaking down all facets of British life within the strict UK class structure, the author examines mundane British activities like shopping, gardening, and breakfast and the subtle differences found amid the upper class, middle upper class, upper middle class, middle middle class, lower middle, upper lower, middle lower, and so on. Truly eye-opening stuff. You will never look at the Brits the same again.
Parable #2
    My friend Matilda (known as Tilly) is very posh. And very picky. At least when it comes to men. For a while she was the only girl in London who seemed to be dating more than I was—and eventually she eclipsed my efforts completely. Still, I’ll never forget the day she told me she had found “the one.”
    “His Internet profile is perfect,” she gushed in her hyper–blue blood voice. “He’s witty, he’s clever, he’s taller than me, he plays rugby, he skis, he sails, and he speaks French, German,
and
Italian! We’re going to dinner tomorrow night!” She was practically squealing with delight.
    The next day, when I called to see if the two of them were engaged, she sounded absolutely crestfallen.
    “Was he not good-looking in real life?” I asked.
    “He was gorgeous!” she answered, “I wanted to rip his clothes off.”
    “So what’s the catch?”
    “I’ll tell you what the catch is,” she said bitterly. “The boy does not hold his knife correctly. I sat through our entire meal thinking how I could never bring him home to my parents. They’d kill me if I married someone with even slightly deficient KFS skills.”
    “KFS skills?”
    “Knife, fork, spoon. It’s army talk. KFS skills are very important to my family. Have been for generations. And rightly so. No, it’s probably for the best that I break things off with Charlie right now. He
is
gorgeous… but it never would have worked.”
    The lesson? In England, table manners are important. Really important. It doesn’t matter how cute or smart you are—what you do with your cutlery on the first date can literally make or break a relationship.
Manners
    Thirty years ago, in England as well as on the Continent, the American woman was looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature, with habits and manners somewhere between a savage and a chorus girl.
    —L ADY R ANDOLPH C HURCHILL , 1910
    Rightly or wrongly, if there is one thing the English have a reputation for, it’s manners. It’s important to remember that manners are not about being superior to others, but about making those