For a lot more information about Nancy Mitford and history of U vs. non-U, and a URL that may well be of interest

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Re: 'U' and 'non-U'




To: 93cloughs@khv8.sch.coventry.uk, ask-ling@linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: 'U' and 'non-U'
From: Geoffrey Sampson <geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 11:40:47 +0100
Delivered-To: ask-ling@linguistlist.org




You have already said what they mean, in your query. The terms originated
in exchanges between the novelist Nancy Mitford (_Love in a Cold Climate_,
etc.) and the linguist Alan Ross -- I am not sure which of the two actually
invented them. They were intended in a fairly lighthearted way to pick
out vocabulary which differentiated people at different points on the
English class ladder at the time (the 1950s, I think). Then, more than
now, there were words whose use stamped the speaker as lower-middle-class
or below, as opposed to the words which someone from the upper-middle-class
or above would use for the same things -- for instance, I think "serviette"
(a word I haven't heard for a long time) was non-U, v. "[table] napkin" as
the corresponding U term. Nancy M and Alan R produced long lists of these
pairs. Subsequently, the picture has been overlaid by the greatly increased
influence of American English on British English; the words that are usual
in the USA sometimes happen to coincide with the term that was U in England,
and sometimes with the term that was non-U, in a random pattern I imagine,
but the power of America "lifts" the status of its words in England even
if they were previously non-U. I get into mild trouble at home on this,
because I lived in the USA for several years in my twenties and sometimes
use terms which are deprecated by other members of the family, for instance
I am chided for talking of the "living room" rather than the "sitting room"
-- this may be because of my non-U upbringing, but I think in fact in this
case it is because Americans call it "living room" and after a while in the
USA I got confused about what to call it, and I suspect that this particular
pair of terms is no longer any sort of social marker in England since others
see American films, etc.


Prof. Geoffrey Sampson

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax +44 1273 671320
Web site http://www.grs.u-net.com




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