Word for the wise ©
We're passing the 20th milestone with this one. The landmarks are the letters of the alphabet and we have reached letter No. 21 with U in our Word for the wise © adventure that will end five weeks hence with Z.
U, meaning upper-class, and U (other class) joined the debate on linguistic class-distinction in 1954 thanks to a paper by Alan S. C. Ross in the learned journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. Nancy Mitford popularized the terms in a humerous collection of essays titled Noblesse Oblige (1954), and Ross returned to the debate with What are U? in 1969.U terms, said Ross, include napkin (non-U serviette), lavatory (non-U toilet), scent (non-U perfume), and excuse me (non-U pardon). In U, "cupper" is a cup of tea, while the non-U counterpart is "cuppa". There's a certain baby talk aspect to U usage in forms like gee-gee, wee-wee, hanky-panky and hoity-toity. Interestingly, "rugger" for rugby is U, but "champers" for champagne is non-U. In keeping with the Thatcherite early '80s, "Roller" for Rolls Royce became U in Ann Barr's and Peter York's facetious volume The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982). Along with using lots of faux U terms for sexual intercourse such as "interior decorating", Sloanes loved using non-U words in common accents, and it is noteworthy that both U and non-U favour the kind of four-letter words and blasphemous terms that the middle classes find embarrassing. But it was ever thus. Here, the splendid Harry Hotspur pours scorn on the mealy-mouthed, "decency" of his wife:
Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,
A good mouth-filling oath; and leave 'in sooth',
And such protest of pepper-gingerbread,
To velvet guards and Sunday-citizens.
(Henry IV, Pt.I, III, i. 257-60)
Next week, we're at "V". Candidates include "vermillion" and "vichyssoise".
