Class and language in England

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In class-obsessed England, one of the bits of wisdom that gets passed from person to person is that the upper class (abbreviated as U) picks its vocabulary from one list and the middle and lower classes (abbreviated as non-U) pick theirs from a different and, oh, so much less prestigious one. Non-U people find four jacks in their card decks and put serviettes on the table. The upper class? Four knaves and table napkins, only they wouldn’t stoop so low as to set the table themselves. Someone would do that for them. Maybe someone even plays cards for them so they don’t have to be bothered. But what do I know? I’m just someone sitting on a couch, working from a recent study on the subject, a couple of articles, many stereotypes, and too many old movies.  

A couch? That’s an Americanism. The U equivalent is allegedly sofa. The non-U for that would be settee. 

How do we know any of this? Well, as it turns out, we don’t. We just think we do. The lists and the shorthand of U and non-U come from the 1950s, when Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, published a paper in that widely read journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, which is–or at least was–published by the Modern Language Society of Helsinki. 

Have you saved your back issues? They might be valuable by now.

 

Irrelevant photo: begonia

 

But it’s about more than vocabulary

Ross didn’t write only about language, he wrote about behaviors that marked the upper classes. (How many upper classes are there by his measure? Haven’t a clue, but the plural has worked its way in here and my job description doesn’t include asking it to leave.) These behaviors, he wrote, included important things like not playing tennis in what the British call braces and Americans call suspenders. 

Okay, I have to interrupt myself here: in British, suspenders are–or were, anyway–those things women wore to hold up their stockings before pantyhose swept them off the field. And yes, I’m sure some men wore them too, but these were the bad old days, so they couldn’t wear them publicly. Americans called them garter belts. In any vocabulary, they were horrible.

Did anyone ever actually play tennis in braces/suspenders? Or garter belts, for that matter? Quite possibly not. Stay with me and we’ll get to that in a paragraph or two. 

Ross claimed the other behavior that marked the upper classes was that “when drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.”

That’s the quote that led Grant Hutchison (no linguist; he’s a retired doctor and a careful reader) to decide Ross might not have been entirely serious about all this. It’s a defensible argument. 

Another U behavior Ross mentioned was “an aversion” to high tea. (The quote’s from an article on Ross’s article, not necessarily from Ross himself. Sorry.) 

If you’re not British, you may have high tea mixed up with afternoon tea, so let’s stop and sort those out, because you can never tell when you might need to know this. High tea might sound like it’s what people on the high end of the class hierarchy have, but it’s not. It’s (gasp; horror) working class–the hot meal working people would eat, with tea, when they got home from work. Since they’d eat that at a high table, it became high tea, although the high has dropped away and these days it’s just tea. Exactly who calls the meal tea, as far as I can figure out, depends not just on class but on region. Like everything else involving the English language, it’s complicated. What I can tell you is that people talk about going home to eat their tea. Even after 17 years in this country, it still throws me.

The high-end tea Americans mistake for high tea is afternoon tea. It started out as an elite indulgence that was introduced by the Duchess of Bedford in the nineteenth century, and it involved cake, little sandwiches, titled ladies, and painfully good manners. And maybe some scones, 

These days, the idea of taking a break in the afternoon to have a cuppa has worked its way into the fabric of the country, and along the way it dropped the three-tiered cake stands, the painful manners, and the fancy offerings. But if someone talks about afternoon tea, they’re still talking about the fancy stuff, which will put any thought of supper (or dinner, or [gasp] tea,) out of your mind.

End of digression. We will now rejoin our alleged topic.

 

Alan Ross again

Ross’s paper would’ve been forgotten twenty minutes after it was published if the novelist Nancy Mitford–who was excessively U–hadn’t mentioned it in print, causing the U/non-U distinction and the idea of separate vocabularies to go viral well before going viral was either a phrase or a thing. People didn’t have to read the original article: they knew as much about it as they needed to.

Ross justified his focus on specific words this way:

“It is solely by its language that the [English] upper class is clearly marked off from the others. In times past (e. g. in the Victorian and Edwardian periods) this was not the case. But, to-day, a member of the upper class is, for instance, not necessarily better educated, cleaner or richer than someone not of this class.”

Which made it all the more important not to be mistaken for what was once the great unwashed but was now not only washed but educated and possibly even rich but still not good enough to mix with the aristocracy. 

So what words are giveaways? A few are (allegedly–we’ll get to that): 

  • Drawing room (U) and lounge (non-U). I call it a living room, making me not only not-U but non-non-U. 
  •  Jam (U) and preserve (non-U). 
  • Looking glass (U) and mirror (non-U).

The list is now some 70 years out of date, so don’t take it too seriously. But we’ve recently been handed another reason not to take it to heart: Ross doesn’t seem to have done any research on his topic. His paper was based on armchair linguistics. So to spoil everybody’s fun, two linguists, Natalie Braber and Rhys Sandow, designed some experiments to see if his distinctions hold up, and clever devils that they are, they didn’t ask people directly, because the minute you ask you’ve made people self-conscious about their word choices. In one experiment, they showed people two pictures and asked how they were different, which prompted the participants to talk about different color couches or sofas or settees without thinking about their vocabulary.

They found the supposedly U words sofa and napkin were more common than their non-U equivalents, and if they’re commonly used, then they’re no longer markers of upper classness–if they ever were. On the other side of the scales, the supposedly non-U toilet was more common than the U equivalent, loo. Where they did find a difference in usage, it generally depended on age. Older speakers were more likely to use the non-U serviette and settee, but also the U word loo.

Draw whatever conclusions you can manage.

How do people perceive those words, though? They asked people to judge a writer’s class based on two versions of social media posts, one using supposedly U words and one using supposedly non-U ones. Perception, they reported, wasn’t uniform, but the “higher socioeconomic group” thought sofa was more posh–posh being a non-U word for U. People from the lower socioeconomic group thought settee was more posh.

Everybody seemed to agree that serviette was posh, although Ross listed it as non-U. 

You might’ve noticed that Braber and Sandow are talking about socioeconomic groups, not the aristocracy and the great newly washed. Did that affect the value of their research? Possibly. Also possibly not.

 

What does it all mean?

That Ross is at best outdated and was at worst stitching thin air into a theory. And that if you’re trying to penetrate a class other than the one you were raised in, you shouldn’t start by looking up vocabulary lists, especially ones that are 70 years out of date.

93 thoughts on “Class and language in England”

    • I did once read an explanation of what regions and classes use the words tea, dinner, and supper for the evening meal. I crawled under the bed and hid until the world stopped spinning. Where are you from originally?

      My partner, who adopts language usage (occasionally more enthusiastically than accurately) once asked a friend over for tea, since she was going to be in the neighborhood. The friend told us later that when she hung up the phone she realized she had no idea what she’d just been invited for.

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    • New to me as well, thank you for the wondrous trivia. Here’s one in return. Do you know why the British started drinking tea with milk? It turns out that when they started making porcelain, they “borrowed” the manufacturing process from unwilling folks who didn’t want to share those secrets with them. So the porcelain cups the British made in those early days were not very high quality, and would crack in direct contact with piping hot water. So to make the cups be able to withstand/mitigate pouring of hot water in those olden days, a little milk was poured first, and then the hot water. Eventually the British perfected the porcelain making process, but the milk part stuck…

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      • Aha! That explains the cups cracking, which I’d both read and heard, but the missing secrets of the manufacturing process–that part was missing, so I spent some time wondering if the whole thing wasn’t yet another urban myth. Thank you!

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          • I can’t remember the source or sources anymore, but it had to do (doesn’t everything?) with class–why the upper class pours the milk in first and (allegedly, although I question this) the lower classes don’t. It all traced back to those early, overly fragile teacups.

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  2. Upper class – there is the aristocracy and the gentry. And the upper middle classes, who might consider themselves upper class. The “u” word that really gets me is “scent” instead of “perfume”. Perfume sounds like what it is – something that smells nice. Scent sounds like something made by a skunk,

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    • Thanks for making me laugh this morning. That’s been harder to do since the US elections, and all the more important. I’m pretty sure the image will stay with me. Thanks also for the class guidelines. I can readily identify the classes you mention, but who considers themselves what is beyond me–not to mention who accepts them as belonging to the class they consider themselves part of.

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  3. I am no stranger to this discussion of the “English” language having had a British girlfriend in the 90s and many British colleagues and friends while living here in Portugal. One noun that still bothers me is Brits calling a sweater, sweat shirt, or now hoodie a Jumper! What the heck is a jumper? Does it just jump on to you when you want to wear it? Do have to jump when you put it on, or jump out of an airplane or window? Do the Us call them something else? Most of my British acquaintances would fall into the non U castigatory except for a nurse I met while working on a cruise ship who ended up going to Oxford. It is getting colder here in Portugal now so I am wearing one of my Jumpers!

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  4. I was definitely born into the working class. Going on education, previous occupation and income, I suppose I now belong to the middle class, maybe even upper middle. It all seems a bit daft to me, as there are so many nuances, even within the apparently defined classes, with people feeling themselves superior (or inferior) on very tenuous grounds. No one has ever asked me directly but I suspect that there are some who would feel a bit sniffy and superior if they knew more of my origins and I have to say that I am aware that some of our friends probably come from a step or several “above” us. It’s difficult to explain but it’s more than accent or vocabulary.

    On the subject of sofa/settee, many years ago I read something that suggested that there was originally a physical difference between the two. A settee is raised above the floor on feet or legs, a sofa is not (I think it was that way round) but I can’t see anything in the dictionary definition to confirm it. I don’t think I’ll be making the point to anyone soon!

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    • The sofa/settee difference: I thought they all had legs, although my couch politely hides its legs with a kind of skirt. I’ve read some Victorians took their prudishness so far that they hid furniture legs with drapery of various kinds. Maybe I have a Victorian couch.

      Class differences, I expect, are embedded in endless ways, some easier to define than others, and class has many definitions. The functional one’s the easiest to work with–how do you make a living? But the British snobbery about class goes wa-a-a-ay beyond that. I’m tempted to say it’s one of those If You Weren’t One of Us Three Generations Ago, You Can’t Be One of Us Now things.

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  5. The Ladies who Lunch in my posh suburb certainly still police those language differences! For a few years I used to enjoy myself at Xmas cocktail parties by slipping in non U words I learnt at my mother’s knee. Strangely, I don’t get invited anymore! 🤣

    Although the fact that I used to end up in conversations with their husbands about Telecommunications didn’t help….

    God, those women are boring.

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  6. And don’t forget “Jump Suit”. In the US it is a one piece outfit mostly worn by women but also made popular in the 70s for guys because of Elvis! Then for the non Us…..overalls. I wonder what the British call these fashion styles!

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    • At some point–probably the 70s–I started hearing the jumpsuit suddenly being called the cat suit, which I found satisfyingly absurd. And for no reason I can explain, appropriate. I don’t think I’ve seen the kind of overalls with straps here, but they do have a thing with full sleeves that goes over your clothes, to protect them, called a boiler suit.

      Why boiler? Dunno. Presumably it was first worn by people working on boilers.

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      • Factory workers and farmers wore overalls, the same as boiler suit. Then it became popular for young children to wear, the kind that had straps over the shoulders attached with a button in the front, and still is popular today. My dad was a professor of Romance Languages before giving up teaching and took a welding course and wore overalls to work every day. They were made out of special fire resistant material but most were made out of heavy blue jean material later made popular with teenagers in the 50s. My dad knew the roots of most words in the English language and often would state where the words came from such as Old English, or Latin. My second language is Portuguese which is a mixture language of Latin, English and Arabic to name a few. In Portuguese a jumpsuit is called a macacão which translates to monkey suit! I guess we can blame it on the Tower of Babel but it is entertaining!

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        • Somebody back there had a sense of humor. I often wonder how it is that some jokes, like monkey suit, catch on while others get a laugh for a minute or two and then disappear.

          I seem to remember some group of people making a distinction between overalls–the kind with the straps–and coveralls, the kind that cover all. That makes sense but I can’t remember who I heard that from.

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          • The reason monkey suit is so funny to me is that my dad often would call any kind of ceremonial clothes as monkey suits. When my father received his doctorate in Romance Languages when I was about three years old, for the ceremony he had to wear the robes with various accessories. For years he called this a monkey suit and called all graduation robes monkey suits. Years later when my son was born here in Portugal we would shop for his baby clothes and I was amused by the name for the baby overalls being called macacão which comes from the Portuguese word for monkey, macaco. The Portuguese often refer to their young children as little monkeys or in Portuguese macacões! That is where the name comes from. Now my little monkey is 14 years old and no longer wears macacões!

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              • I hope so and he will have to wear the traditional 500 year old Portuguese monkey suit. Here is a description: What is Portuguese academic attire?

                The academic outfit, in Portuguese “Traje Académico”, being composed of a cassock, black pants, a black straight tie or bowtie of the same color, a black vest with a back buckle (If one wears the bowtie, the vest is excluded) and a simple white shirt, without motifs or cuff links, buttons of the same color and one pocket on the left side, along with black classical shoes and a straight black cloak for men.[Women’s outfits are composed of white straight shirt, and like the male one, without cuff links, a black jacket with two pockets, a skirt, equally black, black tie and stockings and low heeled shoes. remember that the oldest university in Europe is Portuguese!

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                • They’re nothing if not nit-picky, are they? I’m glad I’m not graduating in Portugal. I’d have no choice but to go to war over the skirt requirement. Or–hell, why not?–tell them to mail me my diploma.

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  7. A story from my student days … A group of us were off to France and one of the boys had a car, so he drove us down to Dover for the ferry. He needed something from home, so we all turned up at his house, which was really a mansion. It turned out that the family owned a large estate and were titled (I can’t remember how elevated). The story was that some king or other had taken a fancy to the wife of a courtier, who went on to have a son by him. Title and estate were partly a payoff for the husband(!) and a consolation prize for the illegitimate child. The subtle difference between an affair which would normally be hushed up for the sake of respectability and the kind which results in the bestowal of an hereditary title etc frankly eludes me. But then, I’m not one of the elite. I’m certainly convinced that if the child had been the son of, say, the butler, things would have been very different. I don’t think that if we had turned up at an ordinary house that anyone would have been regaling us with the tale of how their ancestor was a butler’s by blow nor would we have had the portrait of said offspring pointed out for us to admire.

    I wasn’t impressed then by their obvious pride in their royal connection(the inverted snobbery of youth) and I’m probably less so now, in the knowledge that it would have been very difficult to turn down such an approach from royalty. I would incline more to outrage, I think. “Me too” isn’t just a recent problem.

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    • It most definitely is not a recent problem, but it is seen differently these days. And I’m sure you’re right about how differently the story would’ve gone if the butler had’ve done it. One rule for them and one for the rest of us, eh?

      It’s an interesting tale. Thanks for sharing it.

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  8. What a fascinating history – not just the linguistics but the interpretation of those linguistic quirks. I grew up very much working class which obviously shaped and still informs my vocabulary choices and Ross was correct in that I did conform to the non-U in each of the examples with the exception of sofa so it was interesting to see that word’s usage has apparently changed. So I think the only meaningful conclusion to draw from studies old and new is that British English continues to be both a mutt and mutating language.

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  9. Of course I do not know how you call it over there in the Colonies, I guess you talk about a chaise longue ?

    Older tomes of the Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (and other interesting scholarly journals) have no monetary value any more, in fact they never really had. Digitalisation makes collecting them seemingly redundant.
    A very bad sign of scorn for the printed word.

    Maybe Mr Ross just joked. Besides, what ever “class” may be, in the individual you recognise it when you see it. Or not. There is the strong possibility that “class” (for more than one individual, as in “U”s and “non U”s) is nothing but a selfish imagination, always newly negotiated.
    As important, or useless, as one wants it to be.
    Methinks if you have “class”, you give a toss whether “they” count you in or not. It means nothing else but being yerself. Difficult enough.

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    • Difficult enough indeed, and all those rules of behavior can get in the way. But class becomes important in a variety of ways. Where people believe it matters, it can lead to social snobbery and snubbing, which is painful to the people who get snubbed, and it can lead to very concrete discrimination over jobs. I’m told that having the “wrong” class accent can lose people job opportunities. And of course, if you think of class in the Marxist sense–your relationship to the means of production, and I do find that a useful tool–it has a very concrete economic importance.

      Finally, in the US, at least, <i<chaise longue morphed until it’s now chaise lounge. The evolution of language in action.

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  10. “Serviette” is a Non-U term ? Well I’ll be dipped !

    It did take me a moment’s reflection to realize Nancy Mitford was not the author of “The American Way of Death.”

    When I was a kid on an Ohio farm in the ’50’s we had breakfast, dinner and supper at home but lunch at school. One of my friends (of equally humble origin) had (and still has) a fainting couch.

    Fascinating and wonderful to trace the intricacies of language! Thank you for this !

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    • Hang on, that we Nancy Mitford’s sister, Jessica. They were one wild family. Jessica became a Communist and went to Spain to support the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. I don’t think she fought, but I believe her cousin did. She moved to the US at some point and wrote the book you remember. A third sister, Unity, became a fascist and was close to an assortment of Nazi bigwigs. Nancy wrote novels. I forget what the rest of the siblings did or how many there were.

      When I was a kid, I somehow picked up the impression that supper’s the ordinary meal at the end of the day but dinner’s a fancy version of that. In the middle of the day you’ll find lunch. It’s a wonder we can communicate at all.

      I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with a fainting couch. I can’t help imagining a bunch of ten-year-olds pretending to swoon onto it.

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  12. The Husband grew up non-U and even here in America, he’s been treated in a way he perceives as less well by U expats and visitors.
    As for tea, I had my first high tea (or maybe it was Devonshire tea?) in Australia this past summer. It had the tiered stand with all the treats and sandwiches you described. Use or lose, but if you scroll to the end of this post, you can see pictures and even the hilarious video of Pomp and Circumstance being played as tea was being served.

    Australia: The Blue Mountains

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    • That really is over the top. But for the sake of clarity: that was afternoon tea. Devonshire or Cornish tea would be scones with clotted cream and jam. High tea (I don’t think anyone calls it that anymore) would be supper. And yes, you need a translator or a guide. Or at the very least, a dictionary.

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      • Oh, we did have all that: scones, clotted cream (I hate that name – sounds like blood) and jam. The Husband was very particular about what should go on the scone first – cream or jam. (I can’t remember which one he said is “correct” to go on first, but my readers pointed out that it’s regional and not an absolute. He didn’t like hearing that one bit. 🤣)

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        • The cream/jam order that’s correct in Devon is anathema in Cornwall and vice versa. Since you weren’t in either, I’d say you were safe.

          The name is off-putting, isn’t it? I’ve stopped hearing that, but I used to.

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  15. We call our living room the front room. We eat breakfast dinner and tea. I remember seeing a documentary where a politician visited an estate where there was high unemployment within the residents and they were talking away and the politician said “do you struggle being working class?” To which the young girl answered “I’m not working class, I haven’t got a job!” The politician was speechless 😂 with the thousands of different names we have given to bread in this country I wonder what the aristocracy call a barmcake? 🤔

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  16. When we lived in Scotland, nearly forty years ago, it was still possible to have high tea in cafes and even hotels. A cooked main course, fish and chips, ham and eggs, something on toast, served with tea and bread and butter, followed by cakes. I remember that from seaside holidays in my childhood but I don’t know if it still can be had. Probably replaced by that ubiquitous American import, the burger. ; )

    I love the way language changes but must admit to nostalgia for the old days. At school, we were taught grammar very strictly, sentence analysis, use of participles, the subjunctive, correct use of pronouns etc. So much attention to the detail, I sometimes find it painful to come across incorrect use, it can spoil the flow of reading. Definitely an old fogey’s reaction! But, really, an unchanging language is a dead language. And the joy of English, to me, is that it’s a mongrel language, full of nuances that come from its rich, varied ancestry.

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    • Like you, I’m on both sides of the correctness/change debate. I don’t expect to ever resolve that and find that, logic be damned, I’m comfortable there.

      Here in Cornwall, nobody seems to talk about high tea, but you can still find ham, eggs, and chips on the menu–and of course fish and chips. And burgers.

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  17. Nancy Mitford’s involvement was a fairly strong clue that there was a leg-pull going on, as many recognised at the time (at least if they were U enough to be familiar with her books and family story) – the target being the painfully “genteel” socially ambitious, as in Betjeman’s comment in verse:

    How To Get On In Society

    Phone for the fish knives, Norman
    As cook is a little unnerved;
    You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
    And I must have things daintily served.

    Are the requisites all in the toilet?
    The frills round the cutlets can wait
    Till the girl has replenished the cruets
    And switched on the logs in the grate    .

    It’s ever so close in the lounge dear,
    But the vestibule’s comfy for tea
    And Howard is riding on horseback
    So do come and take some with me

    Now here is a fork for your pastries
    And do use the couch for your feet;
    I know that I wanted to ask you-
    Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

    Milk and then just as it comes dear?
    I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
    Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
    With afternoon tea-cakes and scones    .

    The business of class markers in language will never end – people will always try to find a way to distinguish “us” from “them”, for good or ill.

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