Nans are in a class of their own (From Watford Observer)

Nans are in a class of their own

11:30am Monday 22nd March 2010

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Here’s a question for you. What do the following words have in common: Nan, settee, blouse and lounge?

Don’t worry, this isn’t like a round from Only Connect, the fiendishly clever quiz show presented by Victoria Coren on BBC Four ( It’s so difficult that, quite often, I still don’t understand the question even when the answers are revealed).

No. The answer to the poser above is that, in my humble opinion, if you use any of those words on a regular basis, you are quite likely to find yourself classed among the newly ‘Non-U‘.

You might recall that this was a term notoriously exploited in the 1950s by writer and social commentator Nancy Mitford to sort the wheat from the chaff (or the elite from the chav, as it were) when it came to navigating the rockpools of class distinction.

According to Nancy, who was frightfully posh and awfully well-connected - one of her sisters was a close chum of Hitler - anyone who used the term ‘serviette’ instead of ‘napkin’, or who said ‘pardon’ instead ‘what’ when experiencing a hard-of-hearing moment, was most clearly not upper class - hence ‘Non-U’.

Despite the fact that Ms Mitford had a keen ear for comedy and was being deliberately provocative when she wrote her definitive guide to linguistic social demarcation, there was also a crushing snob lurking beneath her neat, pearl-bedecked exterior.

Then again, isn’t it true that anyone who draws attention to issues of class is, by definition, doing something that is deeply, deeply common?

That’s why I feel right at home writing this week’s column on the subject.

(And considering that by this time next year we might well be governed by a cabinet load of old Etonians, class is definitely back on the agenda).

As the proud former possessor of a nan rather than a grandma or grandmother, I feel quite confident that, like Nancy Mitford, I’m ideally placed to point out some newly minted conversational clues when it comes to the modern class divide - it’s just that I’m looking at the subject from the other end of a silver spoon.

Back in the 1950s, over-striving members of the newly expanding and newly confident lower middle class were the prime targets of Mitford’s satire. The sort of people who just a century before had struggled away in the coalpits owned by friends of her aristocratic forebears were now living in neat suburban houses and using dainty phrases to describe and define their new lifestyles.

While housewives presided over drawers full of polished fish knives, their husbands commuted into London.

In just two generation they’d morphed from miners to minor positions in the City.

But people like Nancy still looked down on them every time they opened their mouths.

These days, it seems that almost everyone, except Kerry Katona, is middle class, but I do think that some highly determined social climbers are more middle class than others and, for them, language is still a very important barometer of social temperature.

Take that word nan, for example. When I was at school almost everyone had a nan.

On a Monday morning when discussing what we’d done at the weekend, “going to see my nan” was an activity reported by at least 30% of us.

Now that many of my school friends have children of their own, I’ve noticed that not one of them allows her offspring to refer to her own mother as something as common as a ‘nan‘.

It’s always ‘grandmother‘, ‘grandma’ and in one notably aspirant case, ‘grandmamma’.

This makes my mate’s mum, a youthful 69-year-old, sound positively Edwardian. When I hear her infant son lisping a sentence along the lines of “when is grandmamma coming?” I imagine the state visit of someone resembling the late Queen Mary, rather than the perky, fashion-conscious woman I know.

As far as I can tell, ‘nans’ only appear these days in sitcoms, or as the scary alter ego of Catherine Tate.

‘Mummy’ is another interesting social pointer. Any child above the age of six who calls their female parent ‘mummy’ is clearly the product of a ferociously aspirant middle class mater labouring under the misguided belief that the term ‘mum’ is in some way common.

(Note to mums - unless you have been embalmed and buried under the shifting sands of the Valley of the Kings for the last 3,000 years, it is never appropriate for a boy over the age of 10 to use the word ‘mummy’. It’s just toe curling for all concerned.)

And what about ‘supper‘? This is quite probably a prejudice of my own, but an alarming number of my friends have started to pop this peculiar word into conversation.

“Come round for supper,” they might say. Or even more horrifyingly when on the phone, “Must go now, it’s time for Toby’s supper.”

Is it just me or does the word the ‘supper’ conjure up images of an elderly woman in a lilac mohair bed jacket spooning up something pappy and blandly soothing as a precursor to her bedtime cocoa?

It’s many years now since I last referred to an evening meal as ‘tea‘, but I just can’t bring myself to use the word ‘supper’ to describe something that’s not quite a full-blown three-course formal dinner, but substantially more than beans on toast.

The very word ‘supper’ sounds so much like something that one of Enid Blyton’s frightfully earnest Famous Five might have said, that I can’t enunciate it without feeling like a total fake. I have tried, but every time my brain makes an irony intervention.

To my ear ‘supper’ sounds alarmingly smug and tends to be used by women who would secretly like to live in a rose-covered country rectory with their pipe-smoking vicar husband, Roger, their 2.4 blond-haired, apple-cheeked children, Phoebe and Hugo, and a big black labrador called Barnaby.

(They actually live in St Albans and have none of the above, except, possibly, children called Phoebe and Hugo and a gerbil called Barney).

I could go on.

When did one of your female friends last buy ‘a nice new blouse’? I bet it’s a long time since you heard that word instead of ‘tunic‘, ‘top‘, ‘smock’ ’shift’ or ‘shirt‘?

And if you are reading this while sitting in your lounge on a comfy settee there’s really no hope for you.

On the other hand, if you’re in the sitting room on a sofa, then well done - go straight to the upper middle of the middle class.