Do You Know About Britain's Hat Cultural?

In Britain, you can find that many social customs are related to hats. If a male guest was calling on his friend, after entered the room, he must take off his hat first. If you are going to attend a dinner party of your relatives' or friends' place, when you enter the dinning room you should not only take the hat off, but also should hang up it or put it on the chair nearby, instead of just putting your hat on the table. When you meet an acquaintance on the street, if you are a female, you only need to nod and smile or say hello to him. But if you are a male, when you meet a female acquaintance, generally you also need to take off your hat and bowed to her.

This etiquette also reflected in the English language. For example, "hat in hand” this English idiom just means very respectful. And another idiom “take one’s hat off to (someone)”, its extending meaning is "admire someone".

In addition, there is a kind of black hat in Britain which is called "bowler hat" (It is said that the hat was designed by a London hatter called John Bowler hat in 1950), it was very popular between gentlemen and businessmen and also became a status symbol of British men. If one wear a black "bowler hat "which is new and straight, people would think highly of him, to the contrary, people would look down on the one who wear a worn bowler. There has a phrase "bad hat" in the English, which means "bad guy", moreover, people describe something which is very black, they say, "as black as a hat", it may be assumed that it’s related to that blower hat.

An interesting thing is that the British parliament had a regulation: the senators enter the council chamber wearing a hat was not allowed, but they must put on their hats while speaking. So many senators simply enter the senate head naked, and to put on a public hat which was prepared by the senate. Consequently when during an issue debate, you may see the hat  was emulatively passing among the speakers. When they competed intensely, the hat was passing in the air, and followed by whistle, stamp foot sound, all of these were just seem like doing a passing game without drum. The funnier thing is, no matter what size the senator's head is, all of them only can wear the same hat, and often caused roar of laughter.