Arguments over what it means to be ‘posh’

WHAT it means to be “posh” was debated by some columnists after a survey showed the top 40 indicators, while others looked at and getting to grips with life post pandemic.

Daily Mail

Tom Utley pondered what his late grandmother – one of the last Victorians – would have made of the survey claiming the word “loo” is one of the top 40 signs considered by Britons to indicate a person is “genuinely posh”.

“As if this wouldn’t horrify her enough, I dread to think how the old lady would have reacted had she lived to hear my own sons, her great-grandchildren, referring habitually to the facility in question as the ‘toilet’,” he said. “This was a word she considered so irredeemably lower-class it would never have crossed her mind that any descendant of hers would be capable of uttering it.”

He said people will say it couldn’t matter less what word people use for the WC, as long as it’s not gratuitously offensive.

“Never mind the loo. Before we know it, we’ll hear even the most inveterate of middle-class snobs calling it the toilet, without a blush. And, all right, this will probably be a less angst-ridden country for that.”

Daily Express

Carole Malone said that, a couple of decades ago, those who didn’t know her would have written her off as having betrayed her class by becoming “posh”.

“And believe me that wasn’t a compliment!” she said. “Because posh was a dirty word where I grew up. It was about entitlement, it was about people who had a ‘profession’ and talked with cut-glass accents.”

She asked if posh even exists as a concept nowadays. “The upper classes don’t really matter any more,” she said. “They don’t rule society like they once did. Their status is crumbling along with the stately homes many of them can no longer afford to upkeep.

“The thing about British life in the 21st century: people can escape the class and the economic confines into which they were born. Thanks to education and social mobility they CAN aspire to, and enjoy a different life.”

The Guardian

Emma Brockes said perhaps all that was needed is a period of reflection before a return to “normal”. “‘I don’t want to do anything’, said a friend recently. She was adamant it wasn’t depression,” Brockes wrote. “It was partly a habit of mind brought about, at the height of the pandemic, by the suspension of all future plans.”

She said we can’t stay stalled forever though.

“If being stalled is what this is, caught between resenting Zoom interactions as tedious and inadequate, and real-life ones as germ-spreading nightmares,” she added.

“Just a tiny bit longer, I find myself thinking; just a couple more weeks to figure things out, even though I can’t say what these things really are.

“Inaction becomes avoidance. At some point, we’re going to have to get up and go to the party.”