Classlessness means your five-year-old chanting ‘sheepshaggers’ on the terraces
According to Ferdinand Mount, a revolution has taken place in upper-class manners in recent years. Where it was once socially acceptable to be openly snobbish, drawing attention to telltale signs that a person was ‘not quite our class, dear’ or ‘HMG’ (homemade gent), it is now strictly taboo. ‘To remark on someone, for example, saying “pardon” where U-speak would use “sorry” is now unkulturny, crass, out of it,’ he writes in Mind the Gap. ‘And when you hear someone — usually an elderly person living in the country — indulging in such old caste talk, you wince and try to change the subject.’
I have to confess, I am slightly confused by Ferdy’s attitude to this subject. Is he saying that the upper classes have genuinely embraced this new spirit of classlessness or that they now avoid ‘caste talk’ for fear of seeming vulgar? My suspicion is that, as a member of the upper classes himself, he feels quite proud of the fact that he is no longer a snob, but through sheer force of habit he cannot help pointing out that snobbery is ‘non-U’.
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