Poging GOUD - Vrij
Never mind U and non-U. It's outrageous that we still revere the Mitford girls
The Observer
|June 15, 2025
We need to curb our obsession with the past and celebrate new writers and their stories
Enough with the Mitfords already. We are still, it seems, in thrall to U and non-U. In 1954 Nancy Mitford - eldest of the six Mitford sisters, whose 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love brought her enduring literary fame - published an essay in Encounter magazine in which she laid out the linguistic rules which revealed whether you were upper class or - well, not upper class.
A pleb. Time to scrub yourself down? Better say you "had one's bath" rather than that you "took a bath" - didn't you know the latter was shockingly common? Sure, it was presented as tongue in cheek. Though let's not forget, fun fact, that Encounter was funded by the CIA.
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