ukilxors arent u posh?

(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)

posh iirc

They’re showing the play it’s based on at the cinema. I’d go but theatre is for poshos iirc

i think you’re allowed to go to see it at the cinema as long as you get a ticket for something else then sneak in once the film you paid for is finished

I'm the anti-jim - had (fairly mild tbh) regional accent as a child until I went to public school (assume this automatically makes me posh for the purposes of this thread, despite any protestations I might make) but had to lose it because I was bullied for it. not that losing my accent stopped them calling me common scum on a regular basis because I still lived in a council house no matter how I talked

Occurs to me I actually haven’t got much of a sense of how many ilxors are actually posh

got to keep a bit of ambiguity in case need arises to poor mouth it to win an online argument in future

absolute facts

my favourite bit of poor mouthing is that lauren lauverne wiki entry where it mentions her grandparents were shipbuilders and coalminers or fucking cheese scraping factory trolleyboys that lived in a hole in the road or whatever first. And then it mentions her dad was a sociology lecturer and her mum was a teacher!

i had a posh classmate at uni. so posh that he sounded english despite being from perthshire or some shit. about a year into hanging out he dropped that he assumed i was a working class person who grew up in the east end of the city and it was funny for me to realize that i just assumed that everyone could completely hone in on your social class based on your accent because everyone i knew who was local could.

like i can hear a scottish woman talk and mentally be like "working class, university educated"

I used to have this posh Belgium friend at school who I felt sorry for because he did get bullied a lot. But I ditched him when he coldly admitted to me that his mother had told him to avoid "anyone from that appalling Irish family" and it was causing him angst. I got the last laugh on his posh bigoted mum when his older brother (who was quite well known in W Yorkshire because he was the model on the Opera North poster) was taken to hospital then prison after a huge condom of coke split open in his stomach on flight from Indonesia or somewhere like that. tossers!

True or False: Only in UK would one's degree of poshness be gauged solely in terms of one's accent, regardless of one's present class or social standing?

False, I would say.

Lauren Laverne’s mum was a Sunderland councillor for Labour for 15 years and was once shortlisted as a PPC to take over Chris Mullin’s seat.

I wouldn't judge people on accents at all and there is often a gulf between culturally middle class and financially middle class, but i don't think there is widespread awareness of this. There were points in my glittering career as an electrician when I was probably earning more than some middle class people.

xp

what is a PPC?

Prospective Parliamentary Candidate

Proper Proletarian Comrade, eeeeeeeeh.

I wouldn't judge people on accents at all and there is often a gulf between culturally middle class and financially middle class, but i don't think there is widespread awareness of this. There were points in my glittering career as an electrician when I was probably earning more than some middle class people.

― calzino, Thursday, July 25, 2019 4:02 PM (fourteen minutes ago)

i think that's pretty common. my uncle - some man so he is - is a bit of a stereotypical working class east end glaswegian and left school at 14 and became a joiner and he is worth like ten times what my bougie parents are

most wood butchers end up with serious respiratory system diseases from breathing in all that MDF dust tho!

If only i was able to get a driving license, that would have been my turning point and full transformation into fiscal middle classness. But alas here I am, in the gutter... again!

I could have been the next Charlie Mullins ... will have to take that bitterness with me to the grave :(

I got the last laugh on his posh bigoted mum when his older brother (who was quite well known in W Yorkshire because he was the model on the Opera North poster) was taken to hospital then prison after a huge condom of coke split open in his stomach on flight from Indonesia or somewhere like that. tossers!

I... am not quite seeing how this constitutes u getting the last laugh tbh

because she described my family as appalling and her son was a fucking drug mule!

sorry an upper middle-class drug mule.

and his mum was quite a big voice in what you could fairly call the posh catholic mafia. Involved in the local PTA and all that shite that your own parents wouldn't be let anywhere near!

I hope that bit of consummate and shameless poor mouthing clears it up for ya!

admirably, calz, admirably

have ye all voted lads

As an American, confusion over class identity is my proud birthright.

to answer an aimless q upthread: it's not an accident that the "four self-made yorkshiremen" sketch was first performed by three cambridge graduates "doing" a yorkshire accent, plus marty feldman (east end london jewish working-class)* as the fourth (in its original pre-python form). jokes abt the observable fact made by ppl not really from the background mocked -- and moreover jokes that land -- are as ukanian as the original posh-or-not question. (

a LOT of code-shifting goes on the UK, in all directions, amplifying elements of yr accent to suit where you are. some ppl are so good at this that no one spots and judgments re "where yr coming from" are wildly awry; other ppl are bad at it. everyone laughs at the bad ones, but the good ones are probably the danger

we are living thru a a glut of fancy foax pedal-to-the-metal on "being working class" by citing what parents or even grandparents did: which is to say relatively achieved-posh foax playing at the opposite. but this is not new either (chesterton had a lot of fun with this same phenom in the 1910s).

anyway: tldr posh is a shifting cultural marker for a class reality, which as often as not obscures the reality bcz everyday life is for everyone a weave of difft performances in difft contexts, and strong performance will always be admired and mimicked

*feldman also co-wrote the famous "class" sketch for the frost report, which featured cleese, ronnie barker and ronnie corbett

jokes abt the observable fact made by ppl not really from the background mocked -- and moreover jokes that land -- are as ukanian as the original posh-or-not question.

took me a while to work out the relevance of ukraine to this thread

ukania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nairn#Outline_of_his_arguments

insania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu2LjdaLOMc

Four Yorkshiremen sketch is possibly more about Yorkshire than class?

in my judgment no, given its original writer and performers: it's abt the performance of a specific kind of yorkshireness as a class weapon (upwards and downwards)

but yes it's abt both -- and actually i'm not sure what metric you'd bring to measure "more about" and "less about"?

"how can we know the dancer from the dance?" as some non-ukanian once asked

I'm not sure either.

The Gammon Phenomena was instructive as you had a bunch of middle class media wankers, who hate and fear the working classes, rushing to the defence of the Gammoners on the assumption that, because the original Gammon 9 had Yorkshire accents, they must be w/c and, as such, being unfairly attacked by middle class media wankers like themselves. This despite the fact that the G9 were obviously golf club/ Rotary Club Northern Tory types. I saw one of the leading Gammoners on another discussion show not long after and he was a farmer who, surprise surprise, employed dozens of EU workers to pick whatever crops they grow in Yorkshire.