Language of age and social class
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 465.
VOCABULARY EXTENSION II
The words in 1.6 are more unusual words and are most likely to be found in writing. Give a synonym for each word that would be more likely to be used when speaking.
What are the abstract nouns from these adjectives? Use a dictionary if necessary.
Now imagine that someone else is talking about the same people, but sees them in a different light. How might he or she describe them?
EXAMPLE: Pat is very shy and terse.
1 altruistic 3 diligent 5 industrious 7 gallant
2 parsimonious 4 placid 6 sagacious 8 terse
9 morose 10 unscrupulous
EXAMPLE: altruistic - unselfish
In English, certain expressions will date the speaker or place him/her in a particular social or age group. People are often judged on the way they speak and listeners may decide that the person is either posh (upper class, negative) or common (lower class, negative). Here are some disapproving words which are used to comment on a person's class.
| Expression | Refers to | Comment |
| a pleb | lower-class person | adjectives plebby (informal) and plebeian (formal) |
| an oik | lower-class man | Implies bad behaviour |
| riff-raff | lower social class | Implies lack of culture |
| hoi polloi | ordinary people | excludes the rich or the educated |
| the chattering classes | well-educated middle- class people | implies readiness to express an opinion on any subject |
| bourgeois | middle class | implies someone who is narrow-minded and materialistic (can also be used more objectively in a historical context) |
| the upper crust | upper class | people with money and influence |
| stuck-up / snooty | behaving in a snobbish way to lower-class people | implies someone who thinks that he or she is better than other people |
| new money | people who have recently become rich | implies spending money in a showy way |
| a toff | rich upper-class person | usually used humorously |
People often continue to use the expressions that were popular when they were young. Cool! or Wicked! are the current terms of approval, whereas in the 1940s it was Spiffing! Similarly, the words people choose to use for inventions may also date them because older people may continue to use a name that was the everyday word in their youth but which has since changed. Thus, some older people may refer to a car as a motor (car), to a radio as a wireless, to trousers as slacks.
In general, older people, particularly older people from the upper classes, are more likely to use one as a pronoun, often where the meaning is really I: One doesn't always agree with what she has to say.
Social class in English affects vocabulary choice in some possibly unexpected ways as certain words are, for no obvious reason, held to be either common or posh, depending on your point of view.
Luncheon, for example, is an upper-class version of lunch. Toilet is considered by some people to be a more lower-class way of referring to the lavatory or loo. Addressing parents as Mother or Father rather than Mum or Dad also suggests that the speaker is likely to be upper class. These distinctions are probably less marked than they used to be, but you come across them in works of fiction where they may be used by writers to indicate the social background of their characters.
2.1. Choose the best word or expression from the box to fit each sentence.
bourgeois chattering classes oik common
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