What Class Are You?

Now: casualised flexible skilled contract- worker = the proleteriat of the 21st century.

However: am on-line = techno-aristocracy of the 21st century.

The market research industry wants to scrap them because they are outdated and an arse to remember and they also state the bleedin obvious - C2DEs like the tabloids, ABC1s like the broadsheets SHOCKER. Unfortunately:

i) clients love them BECAUSE they state the bleedin obvious.

ii) the proposed replacements were barely an improvement and also rather unweildy. So nobody uses them except possibly official Govt statistics. All the segmentation stuff like Multi-Ethnic Urbanites or Pacific Coast Elite etc. etc. that we talked about on another thread is basically an attempt to re-imagine social classification a bit more usefully.

I take great delight in describing myself as 'nouveaux pauvre' and confounding class expectations of British chums.

Shit gets interesting when you go back. Dad's father was born in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and he dropped out of school to work in the mines, then moved to work in a factory. Paternal grandmother, though, came from minor Polish gentry but lost all the family wealth and possessions because of WWII (Stalin didn't like Polacks with land, money, and/or an education). So the chemistry between the grandparents on that side of the family was, well, interesting ...

Mom's parents were both British immigrants, but originally came from Portugal (of all places) and settled in both the UK and the Caribbean. Grandfather was an accountant -- he died before I was born, but apparently he was a bit of a bookworm and I allegedly take after him a lot. Gradmother's family were, I think, wine merchants but I don't know an awful lot about that side -- except I have a picture of my great-grandmother, who looked an awful lot like Ayn Rand (sheesh!) One uncle served in the RAF and another in the Royal Navy during WWII -- that, and alleged Sephardic roots, are that side of the family's claims to fame.

My dad grew up in middle-of-nowhere Ethiopia with nine siblings and a father with no education beyond literacy. My mom grew up in the capital with a colonel for a father, and went to the same church as the emperor. Kind of like a romance novel.

Here: upper-middle class income, but with none of the generational wealth that the long-term middle class enjoys. (Read: no inheritance for me.)

Well there's more to it (it = slumming?) than that, probably. But it's safe to say that here in America at least we define the upper class narrowly enough for it to be rather uninhabitable. [vitriolic ending, feel free to ignore] Which then makes it safe to say, in unison: (1) why should we line the pockets of these welfare recipients when we've got financial problems of our own? and (2) anyway it's not like there's much of an income gap between us upper middle class folks and them lower middle class folks - they got a car/religion/house/tv, they got the necessities.

That, and I'd love to have serfs ;-) (What would be the point of being Eastern European landed gentry without serfs?)

My insane grandpa thought that before my university interview I should have elocution lessons to get rid of my Bucks accent. Brummie mentalist. The Northern people at work think I talk posh. I don't.

While I still had the posh education, the massive palacial family homes and the riding lessons, I was wearing second hand clothes, and- when my father decided that he didn't have to work, and we could live by auctioning off my mum's heirlooms while he lost massive amounts of money being ripped of by ITT and HP- lived in constant fear of the gas and electricity being turned off and the car being repossessed.

I've also had my idea of class skewered by my family's transatlantic lifestyle, as US and UK and South African ideas of class are all quite different. I can remember being taunted by Woolworths and Whitneys at my American private school, because I wasn't wearing designer clothes, while they made fun of my "mouth full of plums" Herts accent. Their great-grandfathers were jumped up five and dime merchants from The Depression, while my great-grandfathers were Vice-Chancellors of Universities and running around to tea parties with King George and things like that. Typical.

Sorry, it's taken me a long time to learn not to be ashamed of my background. In fact, we've only just learned great bits of it

Now, I'm probably middle class and upwardly mobile. I earn more than both my parents, but seem to have less money than ever thanks to the loans and stuff that got me here in the first place. I still have a working class mentality in many respects, especially in terms of diet, work, things like that.

So much for classless society, right?

xoxo

Lucky me, my grandmother (born an heiress to French shipping fortune, lost her place in pecking order when her dad died and as with French system, it went to cousin) had the best clothes archive IN THE WORLD and during high school when I could afford little more than lunch money kept me in 3/4 arm cable cardies from '50s and '60s, little wool suits and was prepared to have discussions about movie star wardrobes, ie. Which Hepburn More Stylish? And my aunt's cedar closet was packed with loungecore classics. I needed these things as by age 10 my 'little' sister was BIGGER than me, putting me at risk to quite horrible clothes.

This thread isn't really about class, it's about background. People should be proud of theirs whatever that is.

I've ended up living in the most affluent borough in England, which couldn't be further from my origins. It's a great place to live, but cushioned from 'reality' I guess. The things people round here take for granted though...

My father is well educated but gave it up to live as a farmer and aider and abbetter . Was always a nomad

His mother was a 5 generation canadain with a membership in the IODE.
This made no money and her parents moved to Southeastern Alberta to farm. She was one of 9 kids. She got married at 19 to a boy she met at a War Dance in Calgary.
My grandfather came from a promient Calgary family founded by an english black sheep. Which was fairly common. He was wealthy when he was born and money hand over fist all his life. Was worth several millon when he died , none of which i got.

My Mother was born to a farm family in Centralwest alberta.

Her father was from Marble Hills Missouri . He trained in Britan to transport bodies from germany to england and france. This is how he got to liberate Dachau.
His parents raised cotton.
He met my grandmother at a war dance ( really) and married her. He was 1/4 semonile (sp)

My grandmother was smuggled out of Prussia in a handcart when she was a baby. She was jewish and they were having pogroms. Her family settled in Reading here her father was a cantor and her mother was a school teacher .

I come from a long line of teachers and farmers. We are also mostly Nomads. Most of my family thinks nothign of cross country moves.

Oh and Emma - back then you didn't not need a lot more money to send your kids to a posh University. It was probably a lot cheaper to go to Oxford than it was to go to - say - Manchester. Subsidised food, halls for three years and beer at 80p a pint back in 1994.

Moral: one ridiculous posh relative is a fabulous thing to have.

However, pre-Thatcher: my mum's family aspirational respectable upper- working-class, my dad fairly nondescript South London Irish working- clas.

Mum- hmmmmm Cornish, Dad bus driver, Mother's family servants to local aristos, working class but with aspirations, grammar school, briefly civil servant until met Dad (w/c, m/c + back?)

Me- confused, educated, married into Dutch upper-middle class, but still stubornly attached to Northern English working-class identity.

Is this attitude just a way of brushing inequality under the carpet? Is it mainly the middle classes who express it?

Me now: public school and Cambridge, professional job (where I wear a suit), own my own house - very middle class indeed, clearly.

My upbringing: middle-class with upper middle-class aspirations. Both of my parents came from working-class families (father's side, farmers; mother's side miners, IIRC). Both went to college and were first in their families to do so.

There's distinction between class as a neutral descriptor as Tom is using it in his question and the word "Class" when used as if it connoted a particular value. Pulling the "Class" card (e.g., saying "Yankee fans have 'Class'") is a weird tactic that seems unique to a particular subsegment of the Yankee fanbase. But your questions would make good responses to that.

¹haha not really

(1) Are we all lifelong bourgies who are so sick of middle class guilt that we need to attach ourselves to noble working class roots, even if we're clearly not poor now (otherwise how do you afford to spend so much time her)?

(2) Are we all born proles who've had the fortune to move up in the world, and does a lingering class consciousness from this past life cause an inclination towards bohoism?

I suspect the former's true for me, and would dearly love someone to prove the latter.

my family is a middle class lot. i am the only one in my entire extended family to not have a college degree. i am a furniture maker and get some satisfaction from working with my hands. but i am not poor, especially because i have no kids, spouse, debt, etc. i am more comfortable aligning myself with blue collar folks, but i can walk both worlds to a certain extent. i'm sure the upper crust would not dig me that much.

"you're like school on saturday... No Class!"

How the fuck did I miss this great comment? Which is of course accurate.

In a completely shock situation, I am perfectly in line with Dan. Please, curb your amazement.

I once asked a German friend of mine who I met in Barcelona what class he considered himself, and he replied "I'm an Aristocrat." Turns out he was the Earl of some German province. Wtf?!

leaving mcintyre out is still unforgiveable. is the bald ginger beard smug cunt from mtw on that list tho, obv he's the worst of the worst too.

Number of records....snob, trifling and lazy. My parents told me to buy music but they weren't well-liked. Parents were lower middle class but educated. Used to annoy them that some people lived the stereotype of the furniture and the designer jeans to impress...and reading is trivial...just like those stories in the paper where kids shoot each other over sneakers.

xp McIntyre wd render the poll pointless by walking it, was my rational

i guess i'm somewhere between outcast working class and bottom-end lower middle

which is the class that gets 2% less take-home pay this year, I keep forgettin'

I am getting even less than that due to rising health insurance prices. Supposedly middle class, but I just had to erase coffee and beer off of my grocery lists. How classy is that?

Beer is low class. Unless you're drinkin' that fancy shit.

Oh, I just wrote "beer" because I can't spell "champagne".

ah, nouveau riche

this thread makes me miss WoW ;_;

this thread makes me miss the hope of upward class mobility ;_;

wtf this is a thread about the current plethora of terrible uk panel show comics, if you guys want to talk about class you have to fuck off to the thread about the current plethora of terrible uk panel show comics.

I used to not believe ireland had a class thing but then i moved to dublin and surprise surprise, this side they've copied the brits as best they can, god love them.

we moved around too much for me to get a fix on where we fitted on this whole thing, though i believe the word that would be used nowadays is 'feral'

always wondered what % of british ilx went to public school

South Dublin (particularly D4) is famously class-obsessed, isn't it, or is it more of a money thing?

I will go on record as having a definite working class background, but like a great many ilxors I was the bright lad picked out of the crowd and was educated to be a mandarin. Then I failed the examination, so to speak, and never got that cushy administrative job in the provinces, where I would ajudicate local grievances and write wistful poems about steam rising off jasmine tea and snow falling on cherry blossoms. Luckily, I adjusted to the disappointment, but it left me rather between two stools, classwise.

always wondered what % of british ilx went to public school

― ogmor, Monday, 7 January 2013 20:05 (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

20 25 ish imo

Is ogmor British or American, though? B/c they mean different things! Argh!

(I'm middle-class, suburban, comprehensive educated, btw)

ogmor is from ye olde abion afaict

dover?

I should have been a lumberjack.

Perfect band for this thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4TQY5-C80U

m-class starfreighter

i get whiffs of top schooling from ilx occasionally & it stirs those slightly murky feelings of class awareness

South Dublin (particularly D4) is famously class-obsessed, isn't it, or is it more of a money thing?

― Tullamorte Tullamore (ShariVari), Monday, 7 January 2013 20:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well d4 is the shorthand postcode but tbh the south county in general is certainly aware of the 'class thing' (because i really understand it very little and think of it this way in my head)- there are enclaves north of the liffey -MALAHIDE- that are posh and there's south city areas that don't get invited to tea in D4. it's an interesting thing to me, son of the west, where we only rank each other (and i have said this before) by farming prowess and fistfighting (amongst the women, who are not allowed use farming tools obv)

most of my peer group in dublin are upper middle, i guess, but imo there's a very wide and fluctuating umbrella covering the middle classes because we, as a whole, are essentially nouveau riche (and now not) and the last generation in particular probably (atill) enjoy a lifestyle beyond what their parents would ever have hoped for them.

i always assumed gaeilge input into you username btw

My other half is from Offaly so the closest i get to understanding the intricacies of South Dublin's class system is Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books, tbh.

yeah that's where i was until my best mate started dating a posho (now married and central to my social life up here)

my own US class is pretty confusing. mom's side's been upper middle class for about five generations (with New England heiresses and Dutch old money types hanging around), but i was born to deadbeat parents in a working class, Springsteen-style NJ shit town, so i've always inhabited this weird netherworld of differing classes. people think i'm whatever the american version of "posh" is, but i grew up eating dirt and educating myself in a suburban shanty, so it sets me apart from proper upper middle class folk. my extended family's reach and my spotty self-education puts me apart from the working class crap i grew up around. i guess this experience has made me aware of class bullshit in america. i'm poor as hell in a white collar job, so i'm probably some type of prole-middle class hybrid.

it's an interesting thing to me, son of the west, where we only rank each other (and i have said this before) by farming prowess and fistfighting (amongst the women, who are not allowed use farming tools obv)
i don't understand our class system tbh.

i'm poor as hell in a white collar job, so i'm probably some type of prole-middle class hybrid.

one of the issues affecting how we delineate class now is that the modern office is much more like the factory than Marx could ever have envisioned

or to put it another way, a hell of a lot of jobs/employees that people traditionally thought of as bourgeois are proletarian in a proper Marxian sense

well d4 is the shorthand postcode but tbh the south county in general is certainly aware of the 'class thing' (because i really understand it very little and think of it this way in my head)- there are enclaves north of the liffey -MALAHIDE- that are posh and there's south city areas that don't get invited to tea in D4. it's an interesting thing to me, son of the west, where we only rank each other (and i have said this before) by farming prowess and fistfighting (amongst the women, who are not allowed use farming tools obv)

leave malahide out of this!

i think it is more complicated in ireland. like financially i suppose i would be upper-middle class, went to fee-paying school etc, was basically blessed in terms of upbringing and "stuff" etc.

but my parents couldn't really fit into a definition of class in this way, i think that's probably true of lots of irish people, especially if your parents aren't from dublin. with southside kids i tend to find that they might be a few generations of dub and their parents before them were more naturally middle class, in a more british way i suppose, parents who smoked weed or liked the beatles or whatever.

my dad went to college (he claims most people chose the courses based on which queue was shortest so you could get to the pub quicker) but in my case we'd be the first generation of the family to be properly middle class in the modern sense.

moving to the uk is odd in the sense that it highlights how much how you feel can be incompatible with the facts. i frequently felt weird and touches of inferiority complex vs some of the total fucking weirdos that south-east england seems to breed, not least in bbc. on the other hand after a while you accept that these people will always see you as some sort of magic gypsy leprechaun and joke your way to the success.

i don't understand our class system tbh.

it boils down to - the more like georgian british you are, the higher you are, but that only actually matters to the south dublin set, and everyone else just wants to know how many acres and are you 'one of us or one of them'.

see, ronan, i think it's less complicated- there's old money (the brits that stayed and owned everything, in the country they are v stereotypical brit posh types, wear old jumpers, smell of horse, have fuck-all income, kids are weird as fuck) and then there's the irish chancers who are creaming everyone else in finance, construction, what have you, and everyone else doesn't really matter but they can pretend it's all about the luas line you use.

Another way this question gets confusing: my wife makes almost twice as much as I do, which means my personal and household income seem rather distant from each other.

rich forever

the irish chancers who are creaming everyone else in finance, construction, what have you

huge variety of different backgrounds within this though.

not as it matters imo

did you ever consider a johnny ronan dn ref

one for the future. i'm bored out of my mind with heterocyclic ring ring, it was barely even funny a minute after i put it in.

might keep it for a while just out of sheer bloody-mindedness

you had to be on the facebook to really get it, the facebook is mighty

speaking of children of privilege, we saw young gleeson on stephen's green the last day and ms mac was proper starstruck

she liked him in 'your bad self'

It's English class culture which is or was what made England seem so class-bound. Obviously in economic terms all nations have classes, but few had the violent separation between classes that England had (down to the education system, among other factors). But that culture doesn't really exist any more. So we're all proletarians now, nicht war?

― Enrique (Enrique), Monday, 24 May 2004 07:53 (8 years ago)

sometimes u miss these terse little clarifications NRQ would provide

sort of wondering if a collaborative exposition of british class cultures would be a worthwhile thread

he's on tv a lot lately according to my parents, he did a charity sketch show thing for the hospice so apparently has been saying yes to every interview request in order to promote it, xpost to dmac

there was this trifle of a couple years back

The academic middle class vs the commercial middle class in England

like yesterday i was thinking about how northern bourgeois/haut-bourgeois people often seem to be culturally distinct from those of london, to the extent that they don't seem very 'upper middle class' compared to the usual home counties archetypes, even though in practical terms class relations are (certainly were) probably more acute in the north

it boils down to - the more like georgian british you are, the higher you are, but that only actually matters to the south dublin set, and everyone else just wants to know how many acres and are you 'one of us or one of them'.

i think my confusion re: this might need explaining. i am exactly 0% Georgian British! but my mother will reference my dad's family as middle-class as they owned a pub and undertaker's but then they had no money and didn't go to college. neither side of the family did til me. of course, both my parents grew up in the actual country and i come from a town (though obvs am still "from the country" to a Dubliner!) but yeah, i found it even more confusing coming over here.

#culchieproblems

The Class system goes out the window when you are from a strange Irish family abroad in England. I had friends at school who were 2nd generation paddy kids, who lived in modest houses that masked a lot of hidden wealth. My dad was a mechanic who worked 7 days a week and still I never felt like I was working class even though I lived on a shithole council estate in a 2 bedroom house. I find the class system confusing.

seems i missed this recently broadcast programme about the anglo-irish but it appears to be available via ~sites~ so hopefully it's not shit

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kxx71

There's also this thing where posh/UHB/chattering classes Scots/Northerners/Irish can come down to London and as if in disguise, make their way through the metropolis with their actual posh status disguised (in that the accents often clash with a general idea of how middle-class people sound, but good school/big house/professional parents). They don't scan 'privileged' but they have the manners plus the knowledge of ritual, education and confidence borne from relative mastery of all three you can have when there's no insecurity with money in childhood. To a certain extent, that luck gets passed off as good social skills when interacting with southern/obvious privilege types who can smooth their entry to the prestigious professions (and think, perversely, that they're doing a striver a favour). Case in point: well-educated Scottish editor with miserly but well-to-do Crow Road-type family has the discretion and manners useful for interacting with others in an apolitical way, but scans (at first) as a wee radge to anyone south of Gretna Green. Extremely successful combination (actually know a ton of Scots like this).

I find the class system confusing.

me too

xp nakh - not quite sure what yr thinking of there, both wrt cultural distinctions of the northern upper-middle class & why class relations might be more acute up north.

i perhaps don't have that much exp w/ southern bourgeois types, but i think there is mb an offhand confidence/aura of effortless comfort which is if not peculiar to the SE then centred there. i think it induces varying degrees of inferiority & loathing in ppl from other backgrounds as LG was talking about (not downplaying the extra layer of particularities wrt attitudes to irish ppl).

posh scottish accents sound a lot posher to me than posh northern accents, fwiw

Me too! In that Richard Wilson/Tony Blair way that's unmistakable.

there does seem to be some legacy of industrial class relations in the north wrt london certainly, with clearly delineated owner/manager/labourer classes, so the housing stock is clearly demarcated and there is less of the chaotic intermixing of wealth and poverty in london (northern bourgeois overwhelmingly suburban or in exurban enclaves like harrogate or wherever)

maybe militating against this is that in smaller cities and towns there is more social mixing, even if not so friendly, and northern private schools seem to be less expensive and less arcane than southern ones so some of the more ephemeral nonsense of class distinction is removed

then the legacy of deindustrialization, rancorous union wars and the end of any national consciousness in later governments that might resist market forces (the palliative of nulabour welfarism being minimal and now gone in any case)

then there is the amount of unguarded class hatred, not that the thatcher deathcult is absent in the south, but it seems to be reciprocated in northern bourgies who ime can exude a vehement dislike of the working classes in a way that seems more intense than the sneery lolchavs/lolplebs contempt of london & shire tories

so although yr grantham (ok quasi-north) shopgirl made a show of refusing to genuflect before the ruling class, once she was established within it she drew up the drawbridge and gave her son the last awarded hereditary title in the uk

Social relations in England seem even more tortured than in Japan.

scotland is another country, maybe even two countries

east of scotland ruling class accents = RIFKIND

yeah i used to read a lot about japan, and though originally the comparisons between socially stratified misty island nations with delicate imperial histories seemed more cute than fundamental, i'm latterly more willing to imagine that social relations/semiotics here might be even stranger and harder to codify (maybe thanks to far earlier defeudalization)

I really enjoyed the time I spent in Manchester for the class solidarity of it. I lived there in the late-Thatcher period, and the whole city had this fierce, angry working-class pride that was unlike anything I've ever felt anywhere in the States. (Maybe in some U.S. cities at the height of the labor movement you'd have found something similar.) As an American college boy I could hardly pretend to be one of the oppressed, but it was energizing to be around. I had to explain that whole aspect of the Madchester thing to my American friends when I came home.

Talking about class in the U.S. has become so ridiculous, since "middle class" apparently now refers to anyone who's not on welfare and makes less than $400,000 a year.

I mean, I think Occupy did us all some good by at least reintroducing class to the political dialogue, but "the 99 percent" obscures more than it reveals.

for all that britishes complain about class, the american habit of everyone thinking they're middle class and soon to be rich isn't very helpful either, if for different reasons

i don't think Northern Lass Margaret Thatcher is going to be a popular notion w/ anyone.

the big northern cities have all had big demographic shifts, waves of immigration & redevelopment in the last 50+ years so I don't think much remains of industrial revolution era demarcations. it's def true that northern upper middle classes are largely suburban but south manchester, say, has plenty of v different districts&ppl rubbing up v close. yorkshire has more grim segregation, w/ progressive waves of white flight creating twee and/or bland towns, & poor urban areas like dewsbury & keighley w/ terrible integration & plenty of bad feeling.

i don't really think there's that much resentment directed at the northern upper middle class though. mb ppl are seen as northern first. it doesn't register like southern bourgeois privilege & doesn't really generate the same animosity. there's a fair bit of celebrity, nouveau riche culture in cheshire, w/ the football teams & massive airport, and the ppl who turn their nose up at that are more likely to be lower middle class ime.

interesting that you've noticed special contempt for the lower orders because i was thinking of saying the same thing. if posh northern ppl are less visible then there's also less stigma, & turning yr nose up at rough sorts isn't so much of a problem. idk, i think serious expressions of this are fairly rare tho, ime at least it's usually done w/ lots of humour and slight self-consciousness. also, if we're going back to this slightly ropey commercial/academic middle class idea, then i don't think there's that much of an academic middle class in the north at all. i think there's a much higher percentage of self-made sorts and less old money being inherited. might account for a smaller class gap & thus the relative acceptability of voicing disgust at scallies or w/e. much more racial tension than class tension in the north imo.

what class am i if i make 10 million dollars a year

~international class~

I used to not believe ireland had a class thing but then i moved to dublin and surprise surprise, this side they've copied the brits as best they can, god love them.

I don't really understand the Irish class system - learning (via ILX I think) a few years back that Ireland has the same proportion of privately educated students as the UK was a big surprise to me. What makes it strange is that the segments of the upper-middle and upper classes that have been there for generations are very small - almost everyone's grandparents were poor, no matter where they themselves are now.

i don't really think there's that much resentment directed at the northern upper middle class though. mb ppl are seen as northern first. it doesn't register like southern bourgeois privilege & doesn't really generate the same animosity.

this is the sort of loathing/resentment/etc i was alluding to, not as a localized thing necessarily, though the invocation of southern bourgeois privilege suggests that its northern equivalent is helpfully occluded for those with money. and this may account for some of the strangeness of moneyed people from the north, for whom dissimulation and studied avoidance of typically southern/posh traits removes them from aspersion. the name of thatcher at a further remove adds a sacramental and symbolic aspect to the offshoring of resentment and blame.

it's def true that northern upper middle classes are largely suburban but south manchester, say, has plenty of v different districts&ppl rubbing up v close. yorkshire has more grim segregation, w/ progressive waves of white flight creating twee and/or bland towns, & poor urban areas like dewsbury & keighley w/ terrible integration & plenty of bad feeling.

the size of manchester, and its agglomerative nature, probably accounts for this. leeds which i know a little bit is smaller and less complicated. to some extent manchester/cheshire i guess is a mini london/home counties.

also, if we're going back to this slightly ropey commercial/academic middle class idea, then i don't think there's that much of an academic middle class in the north at all. i think there's a much higher percentage of self-made sorts and less old money being inherited. might account for a smaller class gap & thus the relative acceptability of voicing disgust at scallies or w/e. much more racial tension than class tension in the north imo.

yeah this thread reminded me of that one but i didn't it to the north/south. scanning through the old one there is some value but the original quotes conflate a fairly specific moment in the 20th century when the possibility of a national dirigism was foreclosed, and the more generic and ubiquitous clashes between the professions generally and capitalists/finance/'entrepreneurs' etc. considered wrt this stuff, there's not a lot of relevance cuz the south is both more heavily professionalized and more saturated with finance capital etc. i think you underestimate the amount of new wealth in the south though.

There's also this thing where posh/UHB/chattering classes Scots/Northerners/Irish can come down to London and as if in disguise, make their way through the metropolis with their actual posh status disguised (in that the accents often clash with a general idea of how middle-class people sound, but good school/big house/professional parents). They don't scan 'privileged' but they have the manners plus the knowledge of ritual, education and confidence borne from relative mastery of all three you can have when there's no insecurity with money in childhood. To a certain extent, that luck gets passed off as good social skills when interacting with southern/obvious privilege types who can smooth their entry to the prestigious profession

didn't have a big house but this is basically me. as i said "on the other hand after a while you accept that these people will always see you as some sort of magic gypsy leprechaun"

but u make it work for you

Are you saying that you *aren't* some sort of magic gypsy leprechaun?

thought for ages of a witty response, came up with zero, so clearly not.

My world is collapsing before my eyes

fuck anyone who owns an airplane

just: "fuck. you."

i call wonderwoman

anyone else ever been the kids that smelt of piss at school btw? I think that may be a signifier in rural ireland but idk how it codes in the uk/us

I've smelled them but I wasn't one of them. Found out last night that yet again a (Southern) Irish person thought I was from Ulster - this happens constantly.

... apropos of nothing in particular

I can't even deal with this whole concept right now. There's a social substratum in UK/Irish schools of kids that regularly smell like piss? From my experience, in the US that would just code as "incontinent".

well there's plenty of links tbf, and there's definitely similar aspects to many of the accents

I knew a couple of kids who were just straight dirty. A couple of my schools had areas that smelled like piss too.

well yeah i mean just didnt wash (or get washed) much kinda thing, y'know, those kids. lice may have featured too bytimes.

Yeah we totally had "that one poor family that all reek of piss" at my school for certain.

Like they basically smelled of "homeless".

there was a few kids who smelled badly at my school, especially when younger. one was this major tearaway, who was very violent and scary when i was in school with him aged 4-6 or so. everyone feared him. then he went missing for 3/4 years and when he reappeared he would greet everyone effusively and politely. genuinely assume they must have done some clockwork orange stuff on him. no idea what became of him in the end.

There were 3 piss-smelling kids in my primary school class, they were all girls. I guess they were all poor, 2 lived on the same estate as me - one was living with an uncle who was a junkie and the other one I last saw being arrested for shoplifting. The 3rd one was rumoured to be a gypsy, she didn't turn up all that often and I think she moved away after a few years.

Thinking about it the shoplifting one probably didn't actually smell of piss all the time, she just pissed herself in class once and naturally us kids were very sympathetic and never brought it up again.

well tbh we alternated btwn poor/well-off depending on dad's work and a couple other factors (when i was fifteen we moved from a two bedroom shack where the owner lived in the coalshed to a five bedroom detached in a street populated by millionaires), but i'm p sure looking back that i'da smelt of piss throughout national school at least regardless of income in a given year. Hmmm, system of classification def needs tweaking.

Kids from here were at my school, sweet kids till they hit 13-14 then their lives were over basically

science sez: the higher your social class, the more unethical your behavior

old news eh

Reboot

Im prsi class a for social insurance contributions

puisne lower middle class with unreconstructed upper working class mindset

partially reconstructed tbh

middle.

posh serving class

aka middle idk

Working, and with kind of a Dostoevsky attitude about it.

Professional consultant manqué aka precarious service sector

LG how does one know in ireland iyo

Cant be education
Dont have yknow the british thing
Property lol

Is it purely income here. Is it more or less easily defined than the uk

Asking for a friend

Is it inherited anymore, or has that changed in all but the most extreme cases.

Is it based on the hols u took when in school

I dunno really, it's definitely different here. I put middle class cos I dunno, upper class would imply some kind of old money maybe? I went to a private school and my dad drives a Merc, I suppose "posh cunt" could cover it, but my parents are really not in any way posh in their behaviour or background. The Irish middle class contains multitudes I guess.

Read thread since, we've done this.

Also yanks really really really want to tell you about their fkn grandparents.

Yanks. Stop that. Its not classy.

under

surely 'hawaii' is its own class

it's a couple of them but at the moment i'm neither homeless nor subaltern

my mistake sry

I refuse to be confined into a prison without bars, but when pushed I would identify as lower than low!

My dad was from a sort of Irish m/c background. He was from a brightly painted 4 bedroom bungalow in Tralee with a picture of jesus in every room. But his family were very sweary and into loud drinking sessions. I don't know if kulak-builder type clans count as middle class, but they were definitely more comfortable than the upper working class would be. It is probably his drop in social status when he emigrated to England that is partly responsible for him becoming such a vehement racist.

rogue/illusionist

Is there a class designation of "shabby intelligentsia"?

low-mid

never felt part of a class, but over time I've realised it's just that really I'm upper class, somehow born into the wrong circumstances, but nonetheless increasingly I see evidence of my aristocratic nature shining through, they can't keep me down

:)

a landgrave of ilx

I'm the King of Spain

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/columnists/2012/11/28/1354104797390/Ashley-Giles-008.jpg

Treeship doxxed

you can strip a noble of money or titles, they can forego public school and shun the social circle they grew up in and yet still their class is inescapable, part of their bearing, their icy detachment from their surrounds, something I recognise in myself. it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about it, I hold everyone in such benign disdain it barely registers

In the spring of 1814, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin "was born to a noble family of only modest means"[3] – the family owned 500 serfs[4]

Lol Russia

My dad was from a sort of Irish m/c background. He was from a brightly painted 4 bedroom bungalow in Tralee with a picture of jesus in every room. But his family were very sweary and into loud drinking sessions. I don't know if kulak-builder type clans count as middle class, but they were definitely more comfortable than the upper working class would be. It is probably his drop in social status when he emigrated to England that is partly responsible for him becoming such a vehement racist.

― calzino, Sunday, 19 June 2016 16:01 (2 hours ago)

half of my irish family a century ago were from this sort of class, they owned land and were wealthier than the people around them, but they had little in common with the town-dwelling middle classes (ie the other half) and would probably have seemed barely evolved to the anglo gentry

class system in IRL still mystifying as it was 3 years ago, but I'd probably put "engagement announcements in the IT" as a fairly safe marker of our upper class - I have never recognised anyone in them, but I don't doubt they are known among their own class.

also, being rich before and after the boom. Find it easier to categorise city upper class, less so for culchies.

Lower-middle, and now middle I suppose? Middle class is so broad, even a run down smuck like me fits in idk

i was born with every advantage of an upper class person but i messed up my entire life.

Solidly middle-class in my youth; living a middle-class life in adulthood, but knowing that the low cost of living here distorts the picture a bit.

I'm probably too posh to be lower-middle class, but I don't think I'm quite posh enough to be upper-middle class (upper-middle suggests to me privately educated and/or coming from an "established" family? idk)

I'm curious as to who here grew up in an environment where the people around them were mainly from a similar class background and who grew up in an environment where they were noticeably posher/less posh than their peers? at almost every stage of my life (school, work, where I live) I've been more middle class than pretty much everyone around me; I'm always aware of this gap and feel self-conscious about it, but tbh I feel even more uncomfortable when I occasionally have to interact with another posh person, especially if they seem unembarrassed about their poshness. I've never attempted to affect to be less middle class than I am (I knew from an early age that I would never be able to do this convincingly), but people capable of speaking in their posh accents in a loud voice with no trace of shame or cringing or sheepishness are just incomprehensible to me.

in honor of the "are you posh?" revive, a revive we can all puzzle over

funny to read through this thread

until i went to college, i didn't even really understand what private schools were. one of the few good things about my upbringing

D&D joke or whatever

"When Greif surveyed hundreds of men about how they most often socialized with friends, 80 percent of men said “sports” — either watching or participating in them together."

oof

https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2020/11/30/male-bonding-covid/

One of my dude group texts is silent until someone’s football team eats shit and then there’s 15 minutes of piling on followed by an hour of general chat.