U and Non-U, 60 years on: Is the English language still full of pitfalls?

from Country life

Nancy Mitford has a lot to answer for. It was she who, in 1955, set out in print what had never been written before – the unspoken rules for being ‘U’ or upper-class, and ‘non-U’. Her article, published in the CIA-funded magazine, Encounter, provoked an outcry, not least from her old friend Evelyn Waugh. In an open letter denouncing her for lobbing this grenade into British society, he wrote: ‘There are subjects too intimate for print. Surely class is one?’ 

Reading Mitford’s essay now, you realise how quickly everything changes. Back then, her observations on class were based on language – whether you ‘took a bath’ (non-U) or ‘had one’s bath’ (U). Whether you said ‘chimneypiece’ (U) or ‘mantelpiece’ (non-U). Today, having a bathtub at all is a sign of leisure, and therefore U (showers being much more common in every sense), while having a fireplace has become similarly recherché – and therefore U – in an age of remotely controlled central heating. 

Of course it was all tongue-in-cheek, a big old tease on the petit bourgeois. It helped that the ball had been set rolling by a very proper-sounding man called Professor Alan S C Ross of Birmingham University. His paper, ‘U and Non-U, An Essay. in Sociological Linguistics’ had been published the previous year in Helsinki, in something called the Bulletin de la Société Néo-philogique. This gave Mitford the perfect cover to pronounce on U-usage as fact. ‘Nobody is likely to accuse either this learned man or his Finnish readers of undue snobbishness,’ she wrote, going on to lay down exactly what constitutes a U postal address: ‘Abbreviations such as Salop, Herts or Glos are decidedly non-U. Any sign of undue haste, in fact, is apt to be non-U, and I go so far as preferring, except for business letters, not to use air mail.

George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to Pygmalion that it's impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth 'without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.' Leslie Geddes-Brown wonders if it's still true.

What made these Mitfordian pronouncements so unsettling is that they took social observations and presented them as settled rules of conduct. So a gentleman would never show undue signs of haste, because it would be uncourtly and smack of ‘being in a hurry’. This behaviour would reveal yourself to be someone trying to get ahead in life, perhaps in the vulgar pursuit of money. This would be non-U.

Some other U and Non-U words are still fighting it out. I always says wireless (correct) rather than radio (proley), but not because I’m a duchess. I just always have.

I do still think that napkin is preferable to serviette and sofa to settee, which is pure snobbery, but can’t see what is wrong with glasses as opposed to spectacles.

A sort of counter culture existed at the time. I remember being admonished for saying ‘What?’ rather than ‘Pardon?’ and Hew had a part-time nanny who told him off for saying he had ‘had enough’ pudding. ‘You should say you’ve had an ample sufficiency,’ she declared.

It was a difficult tightrope to walk. In her novel The Pursuit of Love, Mitford has the irascible Uncle Matthew (the fictional counterpart of her father, Lord Redesdale) yelling – his constant mode of speech – that Fanny used the description ‘notepaper’ when she meant ‘writing paper’.

Did you know that saying notepaper put you irremediably among the plebs? And how about cycle, which isn’t okay either? Use bike, if you please.

Could it only be in England that we have these class tortures? I don’t suppose for a moment the Scots, Welsh and Irish anguish about whether scent is more correct than perfume. And although the French seem to have a bugbear about words derived from English, such as blue jeans, they don’t get upset when their aristos employ a different language.

U distinctions largely died out, I think, with the advent of media types, such as cockney actors and photographers in the 1960s, who had accents. Instead of pretending to be dukes, we were more concerned to be born with a fruity cockney accent like Michael Caine, David Bailey or Twiggy. The accent of this century is, so far, either Estuary English or Mockney and, unsurprisingly, I don’t think we much care today whether someone is nobly born or an Hon.

However, although the abandonment of silly class distinctions can’t be wrong, you can bet some other way of distinguishing the posh from others lurks in our psyches.

I would just like to think we won’t be trying to ape celebrities through this decade. A sort of C and Non-C.