Posted by John Lambert on December 30, 2006 at 08:28:22 from 24.80.105.135 user John.
In Reply to: Re: Class (was Coots In The North - Father/Daddy/Dad? posted by Peter Ceresole on December 29, 2006 at 19:10:44:
Many thanks to all of you who endeavoured to explain the subleties of the British class system. I have to admit I categorize people mentally too - my pet peeve is overweight gentlemen who wear shorts and baseball caps. Yet, if I ever engage them in conversation I find they are usually polite, interesting and have something useful to impart. I suppose the old saw "Don't judge a book by its cover" applies here. Accent and usage divide Canadians too, almost as much as it divides in the U.K. I don't like the overkill of "cool" and "awesome" as marks of approbation and "it sucks" for anything the speaker dislikes. It's very tempting to lump those Canadians who end a sentence with "eh?" into the same group who wears shorts and baseball caps. Is this a symptom of class or is it something else? Education certainly has a levelling effect - levelling up?? - but it's also a mistake to think that only those people who have a university education are the educated ones. I have met quite a few dolts with degrees and more than a few "uneducated" people who are brilliant. Just as soon as you think you have someone neatly placed in his class, he goes and says something that upsets your tidy notions. Class is here to stay, but its boundaries are infinitely elastic. It seems to me that AR admired people of all classes: the educated and the not-so-educated because he writes about them with sympathy and understanding. Maybe the Hullabaloos are educated to a degree, (witness their conversation and the fact they can afford to rent a costly motor cruiser) but their behaviour positively puts them outside the pale.