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.