ukilxors arent u posh?

i'm thinking about the famous making way/barging through the austrian empress & her entourage, trying to work out the role of self-regard/disdain in this, but i think that's mostly down to the difference between early modern courtly manners and modern romantic individualist manners

Goethe outposhes Beethoven with one hand tied behind his back.

van < von

Goethe was ennobled, Beethoven was not. Case closed.

posh digression

slightly complex this one. which means "sort of posh"

mum's parents: born in the 1920s in the gorbals and parkhead, 11 people in a room and half flat, losing siblings to tuberculosis and that sort of patter. think frank mccourt but in glasgow. grandad was a roofer and made a good living in construction, built his own house, twice. granny did odd jobs like store detective and cleaning. mum grew up in nice enough suburbs for the glasgow area - barrhead and garrowhill. mum did well on that exam you did when you were 11 and went to the academic high school and her friend group was very middle-class - her 3 siblings didn't do well at school and all went into construction (with a detour to jail for fraud for 2 of them in their late teens/early 20s). mum got a degree when i was a young boy and was the first person in her family to go to university. became a high school teacher.

dad's parents: middle-class mum (rakish genovese father squandered inherited wealth by time he died, but comfortable upbringing for my gran), dad born to a widowed washerwoman, so not so opulent. grandad became a civil engineer, gran worked as a nurse for a bit. middle-class chilean upbringing for my dad. he went to a boarding school whose alumni include the guy who wrote pinochet's constitution for him and the current president of chile sebastián piñera. being exiled ended my dad's middle-class existence and he did different menial jobs for a few years until he got a degree in economics, he then worked in international development for a charity and then became a middle-manager in non-profits.

when i came into the picture my parents were broke and living in a flat above a bookies (mecca bingo used to have bookies apparently?) in riddrie (working-class neighbourhood in glasgow). when i was a baby we moved to a further out, nicer suburb. was working class but the homes were not former council housing and neighbours occupations included plumber, factory foreman, firefighter, butcher, accountant. when i was a toddler my mum had to go back to work because interest rates went up so they could no longer afford to live on just my dad's salary. my mum was then a student full-time for a bit. so broke often. culturally middle-class though. eating avocados and shit. both parents had a degree (most of my friend's parents didn't have one). mum became a teacher and dad rose up in work and we became materially middle-class by my late teens. my friends were pretty much all working class. if i lived in scotland i could afford to live in the house i lived in til i was 12, but I'm not on course to being potentially able to buy the house my parents bought when i was 12, so i am definitely doing the downward mobility thing.

Voted Bobby Gillespie.

pvmic

My dad was from a sort of middle class background - albeit a Kerry one where he could have stuck about in Tralee and had a stake in a well connected but small family construction business. I think the main force behind his racism was the bitterness he felt at moving to England and living in downwardly mobile circumstances in a poor part of town with loads of Caribbean/Asian immigrants who he didn't want to be marginalised with and felt superior to.

Definitely posh enough to get lined up against the wall by comrade alphabet when the revolution comes.

However I got there because of the efforts of my parents, both first in their families to go to university in the 70s and both coming from middle class shop owning families (dad’s family a bike store and mum’s a pharmacy). Further back there are jeweish refugees, yorkshire miners and bus drivers.

I don't know how to answer this other than Voted Bobby Gillespie because 90% of the people I grew up with were the same. They lived in council houses. They went to Blackpool for their holidays (to quote Ray Davies) at the Glasgow Fair or the Paisley Fair. There were some people who were poorer, and they lived on Dundonald Road or, the real unfortunates, out in Feegie Park. They were some who were richer, they lived in 'bought houses' on Clydesdale Avenue or somewhere like that. There were even richer ones who lived in Ralston or Oldhall, but I never met them or anyone like them till I went to university. Dads went out and got pished and lost money on the gee gees, Mums worked but earned less money and 'made do', Grannies gave you a piece 'n' squared sliced sausage and digestive biscuits and drank their tea from a saucer when it was too hot and shouted at Mick McManus every Saturday morning. So, not really scum then.

one thing that really pisses me off about my upbringing was that my parents both thought it was perfectly acceptable that my "bed" was a foam sheet laid on the floor in a box room with my brother and half-sister above floor level on the bunk beds for years of my formative era. Watching mice scurrying about at head level was so fucking nice for all that time you fucking tossers! Partly the reason I didn't speak to my dad for decades and didn't give a flying shit when he was dying of throat cancer a few years back.

"Definitely posh enough to get lined up against the wall by comrade alphabet when the revolution comes."

🤯 🔫

I could actually write stories like Gorky if I could actually write and wasn't a one dimensional fucking troll!

the point of pondering goethe & beethoven's street clash is bc poshness is not just a q of social status; the same family or institution can produce ppl of varying levels of poshness. even if yr so common that you think the queen is the poshest person in the country you'd have to accept that not every queen/king is of identical poshness and the extent to which they are able to define poshness also varies.

poshness as assigned on the basis of signifiers/etiquette is unreliable and subjective cf. the weird things ppl dismiss as posh (including, according to someone i went to school with, having any interest in yr family tree), rory's new tweeds. you can get these things right and still get it wrong.

slight tangent: at the either end of the class spectrum signifiers are often about positive distinctions: group membership & belonging (altho this works v differently for plebs & proles), but in the middle a lot of the time it's negative: ppl avoiding class signifiers and aiming for classlessness. while it can lead to some weird affectations this attempt at classlessness is more successful than cynics give it credit for - in the post-normcore world it's harder than ever to tell much abt a lot of ppl's status/wealth/bg (hence this thread, to the extent that it's not disingenuous). the idea behind the similar categories of nouveau riche and 'cultural middle class' is that they have basically swapped material/status positions while retaining their ancestral class attitudes to distinction.

the deeper q is why some ppl are more successful at laying down the rules: what makes ppl influencers & determiners of poshness beyond raw wealth, power and status. also: what is all that carefully practiced distinction and schooling and mannered bearing supposed to inculcate? what are posh ppl trying to imitate/fake? i think it comes down to disposition. poshness aims for effortlessness & refinement, for nobility. the power of the noble disposition comes from the delicate mixture of offhand confidence and grace. the comfort w/ flouting norms, w/ understatement (and of men w/ effeminacy) & the ability to pull off or mask being eccentric/amoral all stem from that deep sense of security & facility. so does it show more security, facility and nobility to agreeably defer to the empress' entourage or to disdainfully stride through it? idk.

anyway i'm the only true nobleman on ilx as has been previously established.

Port out, starboard home.

its only another superb thread from meself

as my friend said when teased abt his (incredibly powerful innate) poshness in infant school: "posh is a silly word the children made up"

Educated working class. Earn what would have been a decent wage 20 years ago but which is shit now. Managed to buy a house. Two paycheques away from serious trouble. Don’t know how many peers afford the lifestyles they appear to have. Know how to use posh cutlery in theory but never had to.

darragh u forgot an "im an american and waht is this" option

You can wait in the anteroom until we finally get this sorted out.

the american option is in the title that says its for ukilxors

I know but I’m addicted to voting in polls

nervous tick

Americans all use our forks and knives in a totally insane fashion that the rest of the world can spot a mile off and are therefore ineligible for this poll even if we meet all other criteria

I have been doing it what I was told was the European way since childhood because it is way more logical and fuck passing a fork into my dominant hand

anyway I’m bourgeois down to my bones and at peace with that

Americans all use our forks and knives in a totally insane fashion that the rest of the world can spot a mile off and are therefore ineligible for this poll even if we meet all other criteria

― El Tomboto, Thursday, 25 July 2019 02:53 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

That would explain a few things...

SO, how is your cutlery ordered in your drawer, UKILXors?

Mine:
<Spoons>, <Forks>, <Knives>
<......teaspoons..........>

<......teaspoons..........>
<Forks>, <Knives>, <Spoons>

Chopsticks in the long section the right of the spoons and teaspoons.

<random mishmash>

^trv p05h m8

xp ah yes, the chopsticks, skewers, free-with-drinks swizzlers and other random implements section

(I was going to say "Pimms swizzlers" but that might have accidentally outed me as posh)

(everyone not from Oxford believes everyone from/in/around Oxford to be posh anyway)

i use a spoon for everything

all other cutlery is a tool of the oppressor

today was a bad day to wear my gold top hat, it has melted to entomb my head

your a bloody trendy steampunk, not a real stovepiper. I was just looking at some online top hat sellers, there seems still a demand for them and some of them cost over £300!

I don't really consider it a genuine top hat unless it's completely saturated with mercuric nitrate.

(everyone not from Oxford believes everyone from/in/around Oxford to be posh anyway)

I lived in Reading for several years and you either got that impression or the opposite where people would say well you think Oxford is posh but Cowley Road is a post-apocalyptic hellscape where you would be stabbed in 5 minutes if you set foot there (which it may be, I have never set foot there, so have not been stabbed)

schrodinger's stabbing

cut ffs

fuck him up deems

My friend who grew up in Blackbird Leys would LOL at this concept (she has a poshish name despite this, or at least one that doesn’t strike instantly as common).

mark it may well be that a gold topper sporting toff can inveigle a sassenach urchin of my approximate means and background to acts of random violence against his middle/upper-middle betters but squire as a gael and therefore essentially unrecognising of your grading system i have to sadly decline

cut ffs

mods pls delete my account

xp and a fine gael u make sir

my god the local knowledge is worrying

I recently found an old cassette from 1976, with 14-year old me doing his own alternative Top Twenty countdown. DAMN I sounded posh back then.

when i was a small child i sounded posh because my mum has a bougie accent despite working class background and my dad is ESL and learned english from a posh english woman. had to amend it when i went to school because id have been bullied otherwise

^ That could almost be me.

My mum very convincingly dropped her Irish accent for something like RP when she got to the UK and I enjoyed trying to speak proper so got called posh a bit when I got to secondary school. Hasn't happened since.

Despite a facility for languages my dad has never come close to losing his European accent.

Occurs to me I actually haven’t got much of a sense of how many ilxors are actually posh - not in this thread’s sense of having gone to school up to age 16 or whatever but actually meaningfully posh. You could all be a load of fleabag-sounding fuckers for all I know (nb I do not know how fleabag sounds)

Lol

i'm actually the poshest brit on this message board fwiw

Whatever PRINCE HARRY

The Windsors are not really considered posh by real posh people, of course. There was that thing about how some people thought Lady Diana was marrying beneath her by marrying into the Royal Family.

we shant kid ourselves they said