You are What You Eat 9

I went into all the businesses on Green Street High Street to ask whether my mobile had been handed in, e.g. beauty parlours, florists etc.  Everyone v nice and concerned and chatty with exception of a man in the angling shop. Best place was beauty parlour where two glamorous old bats were having hairdos and facials and there was a white poodle reclining on a couch. (JL)

Did you push a shopper to the floor this morning to snatch a cut-price TV from their grasp? (Times)

The border between the north and south should be drawn at the point where you ask for a cup of tea and they respond: "What sort of tea?" (@carey_davies)

If Samantha Upward lived in Green Street Green, she would be unable to go into the beauty parlour, florist or angling shop. She prefers to whinge about Black Friday – it’s an American import. It’s “folks beating each other up for a cheap telly”. Upwards used to make the same fuss about post-Christmas sales (folks camping out outside the store the night before, then scrum as the doors open), but somehow this isn't "prejudice", which they are always careful to condemn. Sam suggests a “no-buy Friday”, but explains that it wouldn’t mean not buying anything, just “not buying in a media-induced frenzy”.

According to Eileen Weybridge, Waitrose is preferable because although it’s a supermarket, you are less likely to bump into “single mothers with large numbers of children with different fathers” and there are “fewer people on obviously bad diets”.

Some idiot in the Cotswolds complains that in his local Tescos “two whole aisles are devoted to Polish food!” Pictures or an address never surfaced. He probably takes home baguettes and pasta every week, cooks boeuf Bourgignon and drinks Chablis. Upwards think European peasant food (polenta) is fearfully chic. But Polish food? Tripe soup? Pickled gherkhins? Sauerkraut? And they don’t like the Polish writing on the side. Weybridges can gain points by knowing how to say Soave, tagliatelli etc, but they have no idea how to pronounce Grochówka, and can’t brag about having eaten flaczki in this charming little café on holiday, because people like us don't go on holiday to Poland. And it’s the wrong kind of peasant food: everything in tins, packets and jars and smoked or pickled because it assumes you don’t have a fridge. Rowena Upward gives Polish dinner parties, with rye bread and pork sausages, and her friends are shocked to the core. Next week it’s Swiss/Alsace cookery with rösti and spätzle. This summer she’s going on a tour of Hungarian spas.

A BBC girl just talked about the Queen “participating in the Christmas meal”. Upwards and Stow-Crats shudder.

Upwards women never seem to be hungry at "proper meals" (lunch and dinner), when they eat protein and veg in shades of green, orange and purple, and go on about "anthocyanins", "clean eating" and the "paleo diet". This is because they eat porridge for breakfast, biscuits all morning, biscuits all afternoon, and cake and scones at 4.

In the 70s there was huge snobbery over curry powder. You were supposed to buy all the spices separately, know how to pronounce them, and fry them yourself a la Madhur Jaffrey. How many of us actually did this? Curry powder has been available in England since 1784. Cue anecdote about visiting Indian bishop: “I hope you like the curry, Your Excellency?” “Oh, is it curry?”

Upwards can’t go to a “carvery”, or even a pub, so they moan you can’t get decent English food in restaurants. Some Upward parents think children should be taught to shoot squirrels and pigeons, skin, gut, cook and eat them because “our cotton-wool culture has got out of control”.

More here, and links to the rest.

Choose Your Words Carefully 5

Lindsey Chapman

Today at Hull Journalism Day a student asked if she needed to change her accent to get on. No, no, no, no, no! (@DrMatthewSweet)

Trainee teachers with northern accents are being pressured to speak "the Queen's English" in southern classrooms. According to a new study, accents most associated with the Home Counties are favoured by the teacher training profession... Experts say teachers with northern accents are discriminated against in a profession that would not tolerate prejudice based on race and religion. They dubbed it the "last form of acceptable prejudice" in our society. (Sun May 2016)

At Bar school “I felt unwelcome from the get-go because of my accent. I sound northern.... but that was constantly pointed out in conversation, particularly when I was first introduced to someone. Anywhere past Watford Junction is apparently northern... Then people automatically think you are from a working-class background.” (Charlotte Proudman)

Clare Foges reveals in The Times that employers filter applicants on accents. Bring back elocution lessons! If you have a marked regional or Cockney accent it probably makes sense to damp it down a bit, but don’t imagine that the posher, the better. (She warns against copying Brian Sewell.) A strongly marked “posh” accent can also lose you the job. Whatever anyone tells you, it’s best to blend in and be as neutral as possible. “Earlier this year the Social Mobility Commission found that law and accountancy firms were applying a ‘poshness test’ to job applicants, which favoured middle class mannerisms and accents... When recruiters talk about the need for ‘polished’ candidates they mean not just the dry-cleaned M&S suit but the way they speak... It is time to revive the tweedy old concept of elocution.” (2015-10-27. And how can elocution be “tweedy”?)

One employer spoke of the importance of “holidays that you’ve been on, places you’ve visited”. Another employer said: “Accents make a difference, the things people talk about.” “Elite firms define ‘talent’ according to a number of factors, such as drive, resilience, strong communication skills and above all confidence and ‘polish’, which participants in the research acknowledged can be mapped on to middle-class status and socialisation.” Times, June 2015

This is great! All I have to do is affect a slightly plummier accent than my own and people will give me free stuff! (in America) (@AlexPaknadel)

This hotel I'm staying at is too posh for me. I just hope I can maintain my cover long enough before they realise I'm not One Of Them. What are the signs? Everyone is pronouncing their Ts. (Twitter exchange)


GENTEELISMS
Howard Weybridge pens his memoirs, which he hopes a publisher will peruse. It will be quite a weighty tome! Bryan Teale puts up a sign in the foyer warning visitors not to consume beverages on the premises. Samantha Upward shudders at lunch when Jen Teale talks about sides, mains and Yorkshires and asks for a toasted sandwich instead of a sani or toastie. Only Weybridges and Teales say “prior to” for “before”. And Howard still uses a “fount pen” and says things are "well-nigh impossible" of "of paramount importance". Jen aks “Is this an opportune moment?”

Modern genteelisms, according to the Lady magazine: cleaner (daily), posh (smart), nana (granny), expecting (pregnant) and passed (dead). (2016)

The fogeys who hang on to kyeneemar for cinema also use “superpose” for “superimpose”.


PRONUNCIATION
Someone on the radio just said "dr-arse-tically" without actually being the Queen. (Mr Clungetrumpet ‏@StiffPigeon)

A teacher on Radio 4 talked about “skaws, cricklum, ashoom” when she meant “schools, curriculum, assume”. Or, as Samantha would say, “skooooools, kew-rick-you-lum, ass-yewm”.

When they quit work, Stow-Crats call it "retahment"; Upwards: retyerment; Teales and Weybridges: retyement.

Upwards eat samwiches or samwidges; Teales and Weybridges munch sand-witches.

Upwards call the nuts “ahmonds”, Teales and Weybridges call them “allmonds”. Spaniards call them “almendros”. Where did “ahmond” come from?

Weybridges have trouble with words like Tata and Lady Gaga (Tar-tar Steel), though they can probably say “mama” without thinking. (Likewise they have no trouble with Loch Ness, but claim there is a composer called “Bark”.)

Caro Stow Crat calls the upmarket jeweller Asprey “Aspry” (and the bird of prey an ospry); Eileen and Jen call it “Ass-pray’s” and would love to spot an “oss-pray” through binoculars.

Caro’s mother still calls the country OR-stria. Caro calls it a “plahstic” tablecloth (so practical), but Jen and manufacturers call them PVC or vinyl tablecloths. “Plastic” sounds so tacky.

Jen and Sharon prefer short vowels (rhyming sloth with cloth etc), and never quite grasped the rule that only a doubled consonant makes a short vowel – they just put them in everywhere. Sam is trying to train herself to do the same. She doesn’t want to drawl like Caro. But it is terribly Teale/Weybridge to talk about “larther” instead of “lather” with a short A. Upwards avoid the word altogether – and even the thing. They don’t like soap that lathers, it makes washing too easy and enjoyable. (Did people ever “garther” in the church hall in real life?) And it’s Jen and Eileen who bake batches of scones to rhyme with “owns” rather than “dons”.

Sam cringes when Jen says “lenth” for “length”, and Eileen wails when people drop the Gs off gerunds (goin’ and comin’).

Matthew Parris thinks we should say Herford for Hertford and Cuventry for Coventry. He says his lower-middle-class grandparents insisted on it, but these pronunciations would have been old-fashioned in his grandparents’ day. I don’t think anyone calls Lamb’s Conduit street “Lamb’s Cundit Street” any more, either. And De Beauvoir Town is usually said the French way, not as “De Beaver”. (I’ve never heard anyone say Cuventry.)


ARCHNESS
Very posh people are arch – this does not translate, in fact it probably comes across as camp.

“...with nervous whimsicality... She said, smiling coyly, ‘I’m afraid I am the bearer of ill tidings.” (Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear)

In the 30s, a certain kind of Upward girl used to talk in old-fashioned clichés, with great emphasis. She couldn’t say “I cut my finger and it bled really badly” she had to say “I was simply STEEPED in GORE!” Ngaio Marsh sends up this kind of girl in Colour Scheme (she’s always saying things like “WELCOME to the HUMBLE ABODE” or “I was living in a HOLLOW MOCKERY”, until an admirer tells her off), and there’s one in Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (“Oh, are you a Frinton expert?”). If any Upward women still do this (they wrote like this until quite recently), Weybridges and Teales are baffled. Modern readers are also mystified when they come across this style in old books – think it is “twee” or “bright”. The poor girls had probably been told to be original.

More here, and links to the rest.