Diagnosing British class is a sly business. Observe two strangers from the highly sensitive middle echelons meet for the first time and you can see the antennae twitching. The major as opposed to minor public school, the ambition of the family holiday (Costa Brava vs Côte d’Azur), the closely surveyed slopes of accent and vocabulary – all are brought in for trial and judgement.
But for those weary of these routines, there is hope. According to a new study published in the journal English World-Wide , Nancy Mitford’s “U and Non U”, the most famous account of social distinctions in everyday speech, has been made redundant. A statistically significant sample of British people simply couldn’t distinguish upper from non-upper.
The carefully trimmed privets of the English class system appear to be rotting away. Basing her account on the work of the linguist Alan Ross, Mitford proposed several simple variations to distinguish between U (posh) and Non-U (otherwise). Dinner jacket or dress suit, “I was sick” or “I was ill”, napkin or serviette, and so on.
And considering Mitford’s own upbringing, this was subtle stuff. Take a look at The Pursuit of Love , Mitford’s fictionalisation of her upbringing. The bluff patriarch Uncle Matthew, a version of her father, rages against the “awful middle-class establishment” of girls’ schools and their wonky output: “Legs like gateposts from playing hockey, and the worst seat on a horse of woman I ever knew.
” In .
