I was watching some Jimmy Carr (hate his laugh) on Youtube and every so often he mentions middle class as in, “that was very middle class.” It almost sounds like a politically correct thing to be, but not necessary a good thing.
What’s it mean?
Middle class is magical!
(for the record, I don't identify as middle class, and never have :shudder: )I think “Middle Class” is British English for “Basic.”
This sketch gives a flavour of English class.
I think of myself as middle class because:
- I went to a decent State School
- I worked as a computer programmer and teacher
- I own my own house (bought with a mortgage)
YMMV…
May I ask why?
I’m not sure what “basic” means.
I always thought that middle class in England was everyone say between the 5th and 75th percentile of income. Doctors, lawyers, better off managers, university professors, owners of small prosperous businesses.
But most importantly, people who are well off by striving, rather than by inherited wealth and status.
But I’m not a Brit. Just a very unwilling Anglophile.
There’s a lot of inverted snobbery, particularly among the Left, where people state that despite their riches they are nonetheless ‘Working Class’. However, IMHO the joke’s on them as there has been a real shift and if you depend upon a paycheck, be you a janitor or executive, you are indeed Working Class.
Hyacinth Bucket.
I think class, in the UK, is a bit more complicated than that - it’s not about how much you make, it’s about how much your great-great-grandparents made.
I know that. But we are talking about a particular term “middle class” which seems to broadly described by income and occupations. I think it had also been simplified quite a bit in the last 50 years or so.
In the context of a Jimmy Carr routine…
It’s not really (or really not) about income, it’s a (usually self mocking) stereotype about attitudes and ‘standards’.
It’s not even about politics, you can be really left wing and still be middle class.
Middle class means:
Reading a broadsheet newspaper (never a tabloid (Express readers are just wannabes)).
Having wine with meals (and don’t chill the Merlot).
Radio 4 and/or 3 maybe Radio 2 (not sure about this since Wogan’s gone). Radio 1 is for children, commercial radio is for plebs).
TV - BBC 2 (or better BBC 4) BBC 1 for the news, maybe. Channel 4 is acceptable. ITV is right out and Sky (dunno, maybe if they do cricket or rugby).
Shopping at M&S or Waitrose (rather than Tesco, Sainsburys or god forbid Aldi).
Always have a spare loo roll available in the toilet.
[QUOTE=Quartz]
… if you depend upon a paycheck, be you a janitor or executive, you are indeed Working Class.
[/QUOTE]
OK, but that doesn’t explain what Jimmy Carr means when labelling people/behaviour as ‘middle class’.
Not quite, it’s more nuanced than that. Having a good job and a certain income level doesn’t make you middle class. You can be poor and middle class if your parents brought you up with certain behaviors and speech and sent you to private school.
It probably helps to think off the middle classes as the educated classes - went to good schools and university. Know which knife and fork to use with your starter. Enjoy culturally interesting holidays in France and Italy rather than bumming the beaches of the Costa del Sol. Know how to get out of a taxi without flashing your knickers. Have barely a trace of a regional accent.
My private girls schools even gave us lessons in French Wine Appellations when we were 16. There’s no surer marker of being middle class than that.
If you want to get a feel for the English middle classes, you could do worse than start with the Facebook page ‘overheard in Waitrose’. (Waitrose is the grocery store that only the middle classes can afford to shop in).
I don’t know what you mean by ‘basic’ but it certainly doesn’t sound right.
It might have help if I put it in the context of how politicians talk to us. They would never ever say they represented the middle classes as that would be deemed elitist. Instead they talk about working for ‘working families’ which would cover both the traditional working classes and middle classes. I have noticed that middle class as used in the US strikes me as similar to ‘working families’.
OP, are you familiar with the term petite bourgeoisie? Or U and non-U speech?
Yes, there’s nothing special about middle class in the US and you wouldn’t use it to refer to wine drinkers or people who only shop in high-end stores.
No, not really.
I guess I’m what British would call Middle Class because A) I’m a computer programmer, and
B) when I went to England, I visited a Waitrose’s and it seemed quite comfortable and not at all too highfalutin or scrubby to me. Then again I did have a time finding the entrance because they seemed like they were more interested in the facade, but I can’t tell if that was because of their class or because they were in downtown Bath. I tried to go to a Sainsbury’s but it was 4 pm on a Sunday and someone was physically barring the door and they yelled at me “you CAN’T go in. IT’S 4 P.M.!” as if I should have known that provincial Sainsbury’s closed at 4 pm on Sundays. All in all a more pleasant experience at Waitrose.
Big shops do have restricted opening hours on Sundays. But now you know why Sainsbury’s (which was once quite a bit higher up the social scale) is now the downmarket option.
As pointed out above, there is (for us) a difference between economics and culture, which has all become much more complicated with the effective loss of so much basic industry (the basis of a collective working-class identity and culture), the development of increasing precariousness in so many service jobs as well, the expansion of higher education and the increasing variety of cultural markers for aspiration.
In Jimmy Carr’s terms, it’ll mean people who are more uptight about marking themselves off from the rest through the conventional aspirational markers - but don’t have the inherited capital, status and network to count as really upper crust (and any accumulation of a cushion of wealth will be in their possibly over-mortgaged property and a pension they are increasingly scared will turn out to be worth much less than they had expected).