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Take a country full of people who frequently loathe each other, then impose a social system of extreme politeness to ensure nobody can ever say what they mean without offending somebody else – and you’ll start to understand why these British insults are so unnecessarily weird. 如果有一个国家的人们总是互相嫌弃，而在社会上又无与伦比地礼貌，没人想去开门见山地得罪别人，这极大程度上是种矛盾——看了这个解析，你就会懂得为什么下面这些拐弯抹角的英式奚落方法这么奇怪了。 “BLOWING HIS OWN TRUMPET” 自吹自擂 This, of course, refers to the ancient English practice of having a trumpet blown when somebody important arrived at court. The implication is that the person being insulted thinks he’s important, but in actual fact is so unimportant that he has no-one to blow a trumpet to announce his arrival; embarrassingly, he has to announce his own importance by ‘blowing his own trumpet’. Really, this is reflective of how much the British hate the smarminess of self-promotion, which is probably why we all feel so uneasy about going into sleazy banking jobs. 此说法当然来自古代英国的风俗——凡是有贵人驾到宫廷，必奏小号（trumpet）。个中内涵是被侮辱的那人自以为很重要，但其实微不足道，没有人为他吹小号来迎驾；令人尴尬的是，他得“自吹自擂”来广告自己有多重要。这个短语反应了英国人有多讨厌油腔滑调的自荐行为，这就是大家都抵触进入金融行业的原因吧。 | 
