Taking it on the chin

Joe Gibbs is amused by the latest guide to being ‘posh’

HOW do you identify a member of today’s British upper class, that doughty survivor of Imperial extinction, agricultural depression, school-fees hyperinflation, democracy and wokeism? The distinguishing marks are not quite as legible as they used to be. Income or material possessions, despite what sociologists might say, are a poor guide. Many of that class haven’t a brass farthing to their name—or look as if they haven’t, which is not quite the same thing. Dress, occupation, titles and not having to buy your own furniture are no longer safe indicators. Even an accent fails periodically when a generation flirts with estuarine chic. Perhaps the sole remaining litmus test is vocabulary. In 1954, Alan Ross of Birmingham University published a paper in an obscure Finnish philological periodical entitled Linguistic class-indicators in present-day English. In his introduction, the Prof digressed briefly on the behavioural characteristics of a gentleman. These included an aversion to high tea, not playing tennis in braces and becoming amorous, maudlin or vomiting in public when drunk, but never truculent. Yet such minor traits were easily emulated by persons who, ‘though not gentlemen, might at first appear, or would wish to appear as such’. He concluded: ‘It is solely by its language that the upper class is clearly marked off from others’, implying that the intricacies of the dialect were tricky to acquire faultlessly unless imbibed with mother’s milk. Coining the terms U and non-u, he set out a blacklist of words and expressions and acceptable alternatives. Ross’s paper was plucked from the sunless winter of Finnish academia by Nancy Mitford, who wrote an article based on his findings in Encounter. This became the code book for my parents’ generation. Many families added their own embellishments. My mother, for example, outlaws the word ‘kiosk’ and, in her presence, a lady is never pregnant, only ‘with child’. My mother-in-law’s family went one better and coined a set of words with private meanings that appear in no dictionary. For my generation of baby-boomers— a label at which Mitford might have arched an eyebrow—the seminal text of 1982 was The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook by Ann Barr and Peter York. For the wannabe Ranger, it contained a modus vivendi down to the last Gucci buckle. Real Henrys and Carolines could enjoy roaring with laughter at themselves in true self-deprecating, Sloane fashion, born of their limitless self-confidence. It also contained a dictionary, which assumed a working knowledge of U and non-u and overlaid it with a range of Sloane slang, mostly different ways of saying vomit: call for Hughie, shoot the cat, park a custard. Millennials appeared to be marooned without their own Rosetta Stone until the self-published Chin Dictionary appeared. Its author, Leo Chin (only half his real name as he prefers to remain semi-anonymous, modesty being a chin cardinal virtue), is a 36-year-old farmer from the New Forest. He spent three years writing it, cheered on by holloas from his burgeoning following on Instagram. The result is a witty, self-aware take on today’s millennial upper class, with much hilarity and many LOL moments; that’s laugh out loud, by the way, not the version in The Chin Dictionary where Mum adds LOL to her texts, thinking it means lots of love, resulting in: ‘Darling, just to say Granny finally died peacefully in her sleep this morning. LOL. Mum xxx.’ The dictionary describes a chin as ‘a male or female steeped in centuries of aristocratic inbreeding… understanding the true nuances of a chin if you’re normal is like trying to understand dolphins clicking: if the dolphin clicked, chugged a beer off a Titian, chucked a shotgun cartridge in the fire for a laugh and doubled your rent. The world of chins takes a century to get into and one use of the word “toilet” to get kicked out of. If you wear bright clothing unironically, can trace your social connections back to the

It uses the format to parody that class and affectionately recognise its shortcomings

palaeontological era, and think meritocracy is a nightclub in Hull, welcome aboard.’ So far, the dictionary has been sold online to a readership mostly aged between 20 and 40. The average self-published book sells fewer than 100 copies in the UK, but Chin sales have reached nearly 7,000 in three months, nearly bestseller territory for a mainstream publisher. Of an estimated 10,000 chins in the UK, the author wonders whether there can be many left to cover—possibly about 10 in off-grid ruins in Scottish glens. Publishing at Christmas took advantage of chin laziness in buying presents. Some ordered 16 online to give to their entire Christmas bubble and then found everyone else had done the same, giving a tidy 256 sales per home. Spare copies are assumed to have been bound up and used as labrador training dummies. The author’s analysis of buyers’ addresses is an essay in sociology. Castle, rectory, mill, vicarage, manor, hall and barn feature almost exclusively, many entering only the name of a house and the postcode; one didn’t even bother with the postcode. Numbered addresses outside London were rare and can probably be explained by occupants thinking the dictionary was an academic record of tribal dialects in Chin State, Burma. Hundreds of copies went to Singapore, New York and Hong Kong. The Household Cavalry is thought to have only one officer without a copy. There was no address box for a title, but buyers shoehorned one in anyway. In the chin world, ‘posh’ is only for a Spice Girl and ‘toff’ has been commandeered by the tabloids. However, it’s really only a chin who refers to this derivation of chinless wonder. Despite calling itself a dictionary, the book is not intended as a class lexicon. Rather, it uses the dictionary format to parody that class, affectionately recognise its shortcomings and dilute a selfconfidence that can sometimes come across as smugness. It describes a life of hunting, shooting and weekends with friends at their country homes, which superficially hasn’t changed much since the Mitfords and Sloanes. However, there are differences: a loss of innocence and a sense that a chin today is more of an anachronism—not a word, thank heavens, that makes the dictionary. Yet the Sloane Ranger Handbook’s opening paragraph, 40 years later, still resonates: ‘You round a corner, enter a room, pick up a telephone—and there is that voice, those mannerisms, those clothes, that style, THOSE PEOPLE. It all comes back. It never went away. It’s all going on now, still.’