Money-talk Rules

Similar modesty rules apply to the discussion of house prices, compounded by the usual English squeamishness about money-talk. Although conversations about house prices have become a staple at middle-class dinner parties, they are conducted in accordance with a delicate etiquette. It is absolutely forbidden to ask directly what someone paid for their house (or indeed any item in their house): this is almost as unforgivably rude as asking them what they earn.

In the interests of science, I deliberately broke this rule a few times. Well, to be honest I only really did it twice. My first attempt doesn’t count, as I hedged my price-enquiry about with so many anxious apologies and qualifiers and excuses (such as a fictitious friend thinking of buying a house in the area) that it could not possibly be considered a direct question. Even so, the experience was not wasted, as the reactions of my unwitting lab-rats indicated that my apologies and excuses were not seen as at all excessive or out of place.

On the two occasions when I managed to steel myself, take a deep breath and ask the house-price question properly (or rather, improperly), the lab-rats responded with predictable embarrassment. They answered my question, but in an awkward, uncomfortable manner: one forced himself to mutter an approximate price, then hastily changed the subject; the other, a female, laughed nervously and replied with her hand half-covering her mouth, while her other guests looked sideways at me, coughed uneasily and exchanged raised-eyebrow glances across the table. Yes, all right: raised eyebrows and a bit of embarrassed throat-clearing are probably the worst that can happen to you when you commit breaches of English dinner-party etiquette, so my experiments might not sound particularly heroic. Maybe you have to be English to know just how wounding those eyebrows and coughs can be.

The house-talk rules also state that it is not done to introduce the price paid for your own house into the conversation without good cause and suitable preamble. The price of your house can only be mentioned �in context’, and even then only if this can somehow be done in a self-deprecating manner, or at least in a such a way as to make it clear that you are not engaging in an ostentatious display of wealth. You can mention the price of your house, for example, if you bought it many years ago, for what now seems a ludicrously low sum.

The current value of your house, for some unfathomable reason, is a different matter, and may be the subject of endless discussion and speculation – although current property prices, including the estimated value of your own property, must always be described as �silly’, �crazy’, �absurd’ or �outrageous’. This perhaps gives us a clue as to why value can be discussed while price cannot: it seems that the current value of a house is regarded as a matter entirely outside our control, rather like the weather, while the price actually paid for a house is a clear indicator of a person’s financial status.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06