How are non-U?
On the Marmite history of Nancy Mitford-style commandments on what's posh and what's not...
Today’s edition is very light-hearted in the hope that it might offer some brief respite from the relentless gloom of mid-February. If you’d like to lift my gloom, think about upgrading to a paid subscription and get bonus editions:
Previously: Starring Piers Morgan as Norma Desmond
Piers Morgan is trying to make his retreat from broadcast television sound like a victory. You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh.
The modern version of that journalistic staple, the article separating the ‘posh’ from the ‘vulgar’, was kicked off by a paper in a Finnish linguistics journal. In a 1954 edition of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (‘Modern philological communications’), Alan S.C Ross, then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, coined the terms “U” and “non-U” to discuss the differences between the social dialects of the English upper class (the “U”) and the growing middle-classes (“non-U”).
The paper argued that the “upper class [was] not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of [that] class” (quite the radical suggestion in the mid-fifties). Ross suggested that beyond “a few minor points of life” including “playing real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea, having one’s cards engraved (not printed), not playing tennis in braces, and a dislike for modern inventions”, it was language that demarcated the upper classes from the rest of the country.
Ross considered class differences in pronunciation and writing styles but it was his remarks on vocabulary that brought U and non-U out of academia and made them a subject of general public debate. Nancy Mitford — the third most disagreeable Mitford sister after Hitler-obsessed Unity and glacial fellow führer fan girl and Oswald Mosley marrier Diana — used Ross’ paper as the inspiration for ‘The English Aristocracy’, an essay published the same year in Encounter, a literary journal whose slavishly positive line on American foreign policy was later explained by the 1967 revelation that it was being covertly-funded by the CIA.
Mitford wrote:
[Ross] speaks of the U-habit of silence, and perhaps does not make as much of it as he might. Silence is the only possible U-response to many embarrassing modern situations: the ejaculation of ‘cheers’ before drinking, for example, or ‘it was so nice seeing you’, after saying goodbye. In silence, too, one must endure the use of the Christian name by comparative strangers and the horror of being introduced by Christian and surname without any prefix. This unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters — Dear XX — which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.
She goes on to explain that in U world, you have luncheon in the middle of the day and dinner in the evening, eating vegetables and not greens followed by pudding and never sweet; they don’t have lovely home but a very nice house in which they are sometimes sick but never ill; and they are wealthy not rich.
When the essay, along with Ross’ original paper, was published in Noblesse Oblige: An enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy, a light-hearted anthology edited by Mitford which regardless was greeted with a great deal of seriousness by many people, it was followed by a rebuttal from her friend, fellow novelist and snob, Evelyn Waugh. He wrote:
Dearest Nancy,
Were you surprised that your article on the English aristocracy caused such a to-do? I wasn’t. I have long revered you as an agitator — agitatrix, agitateuse? — of genius. You have only to publish a few cool reflections on 18th-century furniture to set gangs on the prowl through Faubourg St. Germain splashing the walls with ‘Nancy, go home’.
In England, class distinctions have always roused higher feelings than national honour; they have always been the subject of feverish but very private debate. So, when you brought them into the open, of course everyone talked, of course the columnists quoted you and corrected you. Letters poured in to the various editors, many of them, I am told, unprintably violent…
Waugh, himself no stranger to generating publicity, pinpointed why turning subjective assessments of what is vulgar and what is not into definitive rules was so appealing in the fifties and retains its charge today: It’s politics wrapped up in faux-politeness, rudeness reshaped as talmudic rulings, an easy list that will provoke the readers to join the debate and measure themselves against the ‘expert’ commandments.
Mitford’s version of U and non-U has proved irresistible to editors and commentators ever since. Ross edited What are U? a sequel to Noblesse Oblige in 1969 and that was followed in 1978 by U and Non-U Revised, published by Debrett’s, edited by Richard Buckle, and offering insights from the despicable Diana Mitford instead
Modern purveyors of etiquette advice turn up frequently in Tatler and Country Life to offer their updates to the Mitford rulings, while debates on what the truly posh don’t do are a reliable source of evergreen content and reader comment sections with flame wars so hot they could warm a small town. In Tatler’s 2019 refresh deemed ‘eating bread’, ‘having a job’, ‘drinking at lunch’, ‘reading books’ and ‘gout’ to be U, while ‘dietary requirements’, the word ‘posh’, ‘public displays of abstinence’, ‘most white wine’, ‘Facebook’, and ‘being friends with your parents’ to be dreadfully non-U.
Meanwhile, the ‘in/out’ list, a fixture of so many magazines that has been rebranded often — Wired’s Wired/Tired and New York magazine’s Approval Matrix spring to mind — has its origins in U and non-U. These are ways to make readers feel they’re part of the gang or play upon their insecurities and encourage them to follow trends, often the very trends that publication’s advertisers are selling.
A purer continuation of Mitford’s iron confidence in ruling on what’s vulgar comes in the shape of art editor and interior designer Nicky Haslam’s semi-regular list of the things of which he disapproves on the grounds of (entirely subjective) taste. For the past five years, those lists have been available to purchase on a tea towel, although Haslam would no doubt remind you that the U term would be “drying up cloth”. The 2023 edition of More Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common included ‘bucket lists’, ‘selling your business’, ‘a pop of colour’, ‘the Wales family in blue’, and ‘podcasts’.
In recent years, papers and magazines searching for space-filling features have created new class tests about the sound of your doorbell (the Mail, April 2022), gardens (no to gnomes, The Spectator decreed last year, unless you’re the King) and marmalade (the Mail again in 2020). The most recent — and the catalyst for this edition of the newsletter — is whether you think Nutella is “vulgar”.
Nigella, whose jokey pronunciation of microwave (as mic-ro-wa-vé) was enough to launch dozens of think-pieces in 2020, included a similarly light-hearted aside in her pancake recipe which was first published in her book Feast in 2004:
I have to have mine as I always did as a child, that's to say, sprinkled with granulated sugar and squeezed with lemon juice. But we live in a more vulgar age now, and my children like theirs spread with Nutella.
It was noticed by The Times when she relinked to it this year and used a hook for one of the most dread kinds of feature — the ‘funny’ list. Hilary Rose, whose usual beat is snide pieces about Harry and Meghan, writes:
Right, forget what you were doing, just tell me where you stand on the big issue of the day: Nigella or Nutella, which team are you? Nigella Lawson has said that putting Nutella on a pancake is vulgar, and obviously she is right. She says the only thing that belongs on a pancake is sugar and lemon, and she’s right about that too. In her recipe of the day on Shrove Tuesday, she encouraged people to make pancakes, which she called crêpes, and confessed that her children like Nutella with theirs, because “we live in a more vulgar age now”.
Rose has either missed that “the issue of the day” is actually the issue of roughly 7,300 days ago or is being tricksy to keep her feature sounding topical. Nutella, which turns 60 this year (now, there’s a feature hook), uses up more than a quarter of the world’s hazelnut crop and shifts more than 11 million jars in the UK every year. On that basis, it is common but I don’t think Nigella was being remotely serious 20 years ago.
Jumping off that ancient Nigella quip and referencing Haslam’s cult drying up cloths, Rose tries to create her own set of Mitfordian commandments about food, on deadline and to a limited word count. It delivers predictably scattergun results:
I’ve applied my mind to other things you must on no account eat, drink or do because they are vulgar, common, wrong…
… Foams. Just make a sauce and have done with it.
• Jus. Just make a gravy and have done with it.
• Tasting menus. Too much, too long, and basically gourmet Russian roulette for even slightly picky eaters.
• Fake vegan meats. Chick’n is both an ugly made-up word and nonsense. If you have to start your meal by asking what the main ingredient is made of, you’re in trouble.
• Calling biscuits cookies, unless you’re American.
Trying to formulate rules in a rush means Rose decries picky eaters in one line before criticising menus that don’t suit picky eaters a few sentences later, and manages to undermine the whole premise of her feature:
• Having a view on agave versus honey, and sharing it.
The whole article is comprised of very specific opinions about foods! However, the comment section reveals that she’s absolutely nailed the true purpose of one of these lists — people are arguing passionately about whether Cadbury’s still produces ‘real’ chocolate, if a little jus can ever be justified, and if homemade mayonnaise is ever worth the effort. Decades-long religious wars have been waged for less.
You’ve probably realised by this point that I’ve used Rose’s feature angle as a hook for this newsletter which is either deliciously meta or rather gauche. You decide, but surely demanding absolute originality at all times is terribly non-U…
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But what I want to know, Mic, is whether U-2 are U or Non-U? And, while I'm here, what about the Lockheed U-2? Or for that matter the metal with atomic number 92?
Oswald Moseley marrier 😆