Status Anxiety | 7 March 2009

As a new member of staff at Vanity Fair in 1995, I was given a list of words it was unacceptable to use in the magazine. A few of these reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the editor — ‘golfer’, for instance — but most were slang terms like ‘flick’, ‘honcho’ and ‘hooker’. The message was clear: you’re in the drawing room now and you should leave the language of the saloon bar behind. Snobbery is always a hallmark of such lists, the supreme example being Alan Ross’s famous essay in Encounter distinguishing between U and Non-U words. However, sometimes this snobbery is hidden beneath the surface and those who draw up such lists — as well as those who pay attention to them — are not aware of it. A case in point is a collection of prohibited words published recently on a trendy website called Listable. It includes ‘funnest’, ‘grok’, ‘staycation’, ‘natch’ and ‘artisanal’.