‘U” and “Non-U” appear to have done a U-turn.
Or, to use the less opaque words of linguists, the days when one British person could minutely classify another’s social status after just a few spoken words may be fading.
University of Sussex researchers have found three terms long infamously considered as signifying lower social status have now become either interchangeable with their “U” alternatives or have quite overtaken them – regardless of the speakers’ social status.
It probably defies most New Zealanders’ comprehension that “serviette,” “settee” and “toilet” have for so long been considered irredeemably inferior versions of napkin, sofa and loo. Anyway, we would ask, what’s wrong with paper towel, couch and dunny?
However, linguists and those ruing the ancient ley lines of British class discrimination reckon the way most Brits now refer to these three items could mark a watershed. They were immortalised as sorting hats of social refinement by influential 1950s linguist Professor Alan Ross, who coined U (for upper class) and non-U, and were reinforced memorably by Nancy Mitford’s classic novels about aristocratic life.
All the same, others among these outdated word rules remain rather admirable in shunning the socially anxious tendency to euphemise or pointlessly aggrandise certain things. The “U” stoutly held that people died; they didn’t “pass” or “pass on” and nor did their loved ones “lose” them. False teeth were false teeth; styling them “dentures” didn’t make them any less false. Writing paper was paper for writing on, not the twee conceit of “note paper”.
What went on toast was jam, not “preserves” or “conserves”. For pity’s sake we all know how jam is made; why show off about it? People lived in houses, not the presumptuously entitled “homes”.
But other U-sages have been pensioned off unmissed: scent for perfume; spectacles, chimney pieces and looking glasses for glasses, mantelpieces and mirrors.
The chief non-U battering ram is surely the heroic invention of Thomas Crapper and the many playful, rude and generally irresistible words for this essential plumbing beside the U “loo” – bog, jacks, WC, privy, outhouse, thunderbox, lavvy and, perhaps most gloriously, the throne.
Ditch-dying stalwarts still contend “napkin” is only correct when the item is made of cloth (or fabric, if one were to be common), whereas “serviette” is the more accurate if the item is made of paper.
Talking of towels, the latest ritualised instalment of the U/non-U debate will air shortly: designer Nicky Haslam’s annual “common” tea towel. On this (which the non-common would actually call a drying or drying-up cloth), the eccentric septuagenarian lists what he finds naff, giving thousands the fun of seeing how many items they can tick off. Haslam picks a losing battle, as so many of his bugbears are quite literally common, to the point of being ubiquitous: tattoos, cockapoos, wooden block signs saying “Life/Love/Enjoy”, baby showers, celebrity ambassadors, drag and self-pity.
Still, some of his listings are examples of people seemingly uncritically following the herd to instant and not necessarily harmless clichés: fads like all-grey décor, including granite kitchens; shelling out fortunes for so-called designer dogs without heed to puppy-farming or physical soundness; disregarding the plastic tat and sheer vanity of gender “reveal” parties; inking images and sentiments onto skin which, given decades of future life development, may become irrelevant or worse, mortifying.
Haslam pleads cheerfully guilty to snobbery and authoritarianism about that most subjective of things, taste. But he’s also a champion against lack of originality and imagination, his towel an annual reminder of the many ways people reflexively adopt items and habits to signify their specialness and individuality, while in effect doing the opposite.
One might say his drying-up cloth doubles as a looking glass.
