Old rules about whether to say sofa or settee, loo or toilet, are disappearing down the pan. But will we find new ways to judge each other on how we talk?
and features a princess, a lord, a lady, a Getty and a Goldsmith. But forget all that: it’s practically Scandinavia here now that the Prince of Wales has been heard saying “Pleased to meet you” – a phrase, I learn, that issocial death. different social classes have stopped using different words for the thing we sit on in front of the television. The non-U “settee” is dying out and we all mostly say “sofa”.
It’s amazing that U and non-U, the 1950s set of linguistic class signifiers popularised by Nancy Mitford, is still knocking around. Surely those distinctions stopped making sense in the 1960s, around the time Mick Jagger perfected his mockney accent? That cringey affectation is going stronger than ever, incidentally: social media ispretending to be “roadmen” .
The giant pit of words that is the internet means we live radically less linguistically siloed lives, too. Perhaps this study will finally bury U and non-U. Of course, it won’t stop us judging each other based on how we talk; plenty of words and phrases make me clutch my pearls in horror. I have started compiling a list of my most irredeemable for 2024: Substack, sleepmaxxing, fridgescape, “passionate about content creation” and microbiome. Also dolphin .
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