Beware stereotypes

There's a game that my wife and I used to play whenever we went abroad and I recommend it to anybody who thinks he, she is pretty good at spotting foreigners – I mean being confident that the couple coming towards you are French, that the man peering into the bookstall is a German, that the young fellow with the loose-limbed walk is an American, and so forth.

The game was best played on a ship, the first evening out, when everybody had come down to dinner. It's a wary time for even the most socially assured person, when we are surrounded by strangers who are going to be for several days part of the family, so to speak. Most of us are a touch nervous or unusually breezy and affable, which is the same thing.

One time we were sailing from Venice to the port of Athens which involved three meals, dinner the first night, breakfast and lunch, before we slid – just – through the locks at Piraeus. This little voyage was a specially good test because we had no idea what types might be aboard. On a transatlantic liner you know beforehand that the great majority of the passengers are going to be Americans and a good many of the rest will be nationals of the ship's country of origin, of registry. Nonetheless, at dinner time on this trip to Greece on the good ship Achilleus, we played the usual game with the usual confidence, especially since there was no way, short of outright rudeness, of checking our score. Except once.

Sitting at a table by a window, close enough to be scrutinised, far enough for us not to hear their voices, was a couple – a middle-aged man and what I once would have called an intensely pretty girl. I'm now warned by intense female colleagues that that is condescending macho talk. All right, a middle-aged man and a pretty young woman. He was the main puzzle. He was at once large and neat, probably – as large, even fat men are – a very good dancer. He had a tan and shiny brown hair flecked with grey around the ears which could have made him a businessman on holiday, a golf club secretary, but the nationality... He had a small, walrus moustache, but his upper lip moved a good deal which ruled him out as an Englishman.

The so-called stiff upper lip of Englishman is not either an insult or a compliment. It's an accurate observation of linguistic scholars that Englishmen, southern Englishmen anyway, talk from the mouth and the movement of the lower lip suffices. Most Americans, on the other hand, American men especially, talk from the oesophagus, if not from the stomach. Their mouths are required to be more athletic.

The man had positive gestures and nodded his head a good deal. He was seen to be in enthusiastic agreement with much that the young woman said and I didn't blame because, as I said, she was intensely pretty. From time to time a hand reached across the table to pledge affection beyond the reach of words. It was, you'll gather, a happy, a touching scene. Both of them were so open, so expressive in their talk that after much discussion and cogitation, we decided he was a German businessman and she was his secretary or mistress or both.

So, we ran into them the next morning. We had lunch with them before we docked. We got along fine and that evening we met and had a luscious seafood dinner at a restaurant down by the harbour. Well, he was a retired British test pilot who had tried out the first Comets, the first commercial jets and was feeling pretty sad. This was the autumn of 1954 and earlier that year, two serious accidents subsequently discovered to be caused by metal fatigue had resulted in grounding the Comet. However, he was convinced that jet planes were bound to come back as the standard aircraft for long-distance flights and, of course, he was right.

And how about the secretary/mistress? She was his daughter, starting a long-promised holiday with father. The mother was dead. We asked them what they guessed we were. They'd been quite certain. I was something like, as they put it, a retired French tennis player and my wife was either French or Italian. They scored the only points in the whole game since I could tell them truthfully that my wife was a Creole in the American sense of a French family transported in the late nineteenth century to New Orleans. If either of us starts to get cocky about labelling any stranger out of earshot, we lift a warning finger and say, 'Remember the Achilleus!'

Well, a few weeks ago, we'd been spending the weekend with an old friend in Connecticut and were standing on the platform waiting for the next train back to New York. It was about eleven in the morning, so, as you'd guess, all the working types from manual to chair-bound, the regular commuters, the businessmen, the lawyers and such, who work in the city had long gone. This left a fine mixture of fairly comfortable types and carefree types, matrons off to shop in the city, young couples too young or too smart to be confined by a steady job, old men. There was a quartet, a youngish middle-aged woman and – two, maybe – her daughters, all extremely good-looking and confident in their looks and appearance, which was mod.

They had to be Americans. Why? They were all, all three of them, actively, shamelessly, chewing gum. Now this was a puzzle to me. They were simply not the type. There has been, down the past 30 years or so, a dramatic decline in the habit of chewing gum, so much so that you no longer see the sidewalks of the city studded with what used to look like little circles of rubber. Gum-chewing, as a national habit, seems to have gone the way of tobacco-chewing. The only people who chew gum today are baseball pitchers, some youngsters in the park and old bums. It made no sense to see this very handsome, elegant family chewing away, all three of them.

I did say, did I not, a quartet. Well, they turned into a quartet when a large, lumbering, good-natured older man who'd been standing off to the side moved over to them and for the first time, one of them spoke. It was the older man and they all responded with vivacity and in Swedish. It turned out they were all on their first visit to America and had been visiting a long, unseen relative in Connecticut and so as to mingle with the natives, of course, they chewed gum.

This all goes to the tenacity with which all of us cling to stereotypes, especially to outworn stereotypes. It makes life so much easier if we can picture outright what a typical Englishman or Frenchman or German or Russian looks like. When, from time to time, I run into visiting Englishmen who are positive about their preconceptions of such things, I take them over to the Upper West Side of Manhattan and say, 'OK, pick out the nationals!' 'But,' they say, 'they're all Americans!' 'Yes, but of what sort? How soon after an immigrant arrives do the genes change?'

Well, pretty soon such dogmatic visitors grow bewildered because just across the park from where I'm talking – say, a drive, a three-wood and an eight-iron – you can stand amid a flowing tide of people who, if you sent them back to their native lands or the lands of their fathers, would then be instantly taken for granted as Germans, Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Italians, Czechs and, these days, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Vietnamese. Of course, we're more confident about the last three lots but only because they're dark. We don't really know, for sure, the difference.

As with spotting national types, so with our ideas of their typical habits. I think... I think it was about 30 years ago that I persuaded a pollster, one of the Gallup, Lou Harris breed, to take a rest from the endless surveying of political issues and opinions and do some sort of social survey. When did most Americans eat dinner? What time did they go to bed? What did they have for breakfast? And so on.

And I recall one or two shocks to our preconceptions from that study. Everybody knows – or knew then – that the English drink tea for breakfast and the Americans coffee. Well, it came out that coffee-drinking was then in a swift decline but only among young people. An actual majority at that time – it was in the late Fifties – of people in their twenties didn't drink coffee for breakfast. They drank a soft drink, one of those gassy, sweet concoctions called something like Fuzz or Skat or Tass.

I wish some British pollster would do a similar national survey and let us know about the present habits of the race, if only to bring Americans up to date about a people they picture as drinking tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner, whose favourite food is roast beef and Brussels sprouts, who's national game is cricket. It is, of course, like practically every other nation on earth except the United States, soccer. How about Spain? No longer bull fighting – soccer, of course. And we all know that Americans' favourite entertainment, the entertainment they pay for apart from the movies, is baseball. Right? Wrong!

The – just out – statistical abstract of the United States 1984, an arsenal of ammunition for destroying preconceptions, has just revealed that whereas 20 plus million Americans buy tickets to baseball games, 32 millions now buy tickets to symphony concerts and the opera. We all know, do we not, that television has killed the habit of reading among the young especially. Ah, yes. Well, not so! Well, perhaps more accurately, watching television has had a damaging effect on the buying of books. Every school teacher deplores this fact. It turns out not to be a fact. In the past six years only, the annual sale of books in the United States has gone from one and a half billion to one point eight billions.

But it's not all good news. Remember I mentioned the other week the staggering fact that 65 million Americans either play or watch on the telly or read about bowling – tenpins – but only just over five per cent of Americans play, read about or watch golf.

Imagine a nation so benighted that 95 Americans in a hundred don't know, wouldn't recognise and maybe have never heard of the all-time giant of the greatest game, Jack William Nicklaus.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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