In a 1954 essay, “The English Aristocracy,” Nancy Mitford observed that English class consciousness had permeated the language itself, so that using the wrong term betrayed a lack of breeding. She had been inspired by linguist Alan S.C. Ross, who distinguished upper-class (“U”) terms from those used by the middle class:

U	Non-U
Bike or Bicycle	Cycle
Dinner jacket	Dress suit
Knave (cards)	Jack
Vegetables	Greens
Ice	Ice cream
Scent	Perfume
They’ve a very nice house	They have (got) a lovely home
Ill (in bed)	Sick (in bed)
Looking-glass	Mirror
Chimneypiece	Mantelpiece
Graveyard	Cemetery
Spectacles	Glasses
False teeth	Dentures
Die	Pass on
Mad	Mental
Jam	Preserve
Napkin	Serviette
Sofa	Settee or couch
Lavatory or loo	Toilet
Rich	Wealthy
Good health	Cheers
Lunch	Dinner (for midday meal)
Pudding	Sweet
Drawing-room	Lounge
Writing-paper	Note-paper
What?	Pardon?
How d’you do?	Pleased to meet you
Wireless	Radio
(School)master, mistress	Teacher

Ross added, “It is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished since they are neither cleaner, richer, nor better-educated than anybody else.” Mitford said she’d written the essay “In order to demonstrate the upper middle class does not merge imperceptibly into the middle class.”

The essay touched off a vigorous national debate about English snobbery; Mitford’s essay was published in a 1956 book, Noblesse Oblige, to which John Betjeman contributed a mordant poem, “How to Get On in Society”:

Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It’s ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule’s comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

(Alan S.C. Ross, “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 55:1 [1954], 20-56.)

Students are sometimes taught never to use the same word twice in a sentence. This can lead to trouble: If a writer uses a synonym merely to avoid repeating a word, the reader can be left wondering whether there’s some significance in the change. H.W. Fowler called this affliction elegant variation and added, “There are few literary faults so widely prevalent.” He gives some examples:

The Bohemian Diet will be the second Parliament to elect women deputies, for Sweden already has several lady deputies.

Mr. John Redmond has just now a path to tread even more thorny than that which Mr. Asquith has to walk.

“What has Bohemia done that its females should be mere women?” Fowler asks. “And can Mr. Asquith really have taught himself to walk without treading?”

Charles W. Morton called this the “elongated yellow fruit” school of writing, after a famous second reference to a banana in the Boston Evening Transcript. (Sub-editors at the Guardian began using the term “povs” after one writer referred to carrots as “popular orange vegetables.”) Morton cited some further examples:

billiard balls = “the numbered spheroids”
Bluebeard = “the azure-whiskered wifeslayer”
Easter egg hunt = “hen-fruit safari”
milk = “lacteal fluid”
oysters = “succulent bivalves”
peanut = “the succulent goober”
songbird = “avian songster”
truck = “rubber-tired mastodon of the highway”

In A Slight Sense of Outrage, Morton wrote that the sin “lies somewhere between the cliché and the ‘fine writing’ so dreaded by teachers of English Composition. … It does bespeak an author who wishes to seem knowledgeable, and versatile. … It can also bespeak an author who is merely pompous.”

William Hone’s Every-Day Book of 1837 repeats a story in which St. Martin meets the devil, who asks why he is walking to Rome rather than riding. The saint commands him to become a beast of burden, the devil assumes the shape of a mule, and Martin jumps onto his back and spurs him on his way by repeatedly making the sign of the cross. At length the devil says:

Signa te, Signa: temere me tangis et angis:
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.

That means “Cross, cross thyself — thou plaguest and vexest me without necessity; for, owing to my exertions, Rome, the object of thy wishes, will soon be near.” And each line is a palindrome, reading the same backward and forward.

Hone adds, “These lines have been quoted imperfectly and separately in ‘Encyclopedies’ and other books, under the words ‘Palindromical verses;’ but the reader will not easily meet with the legendary tale, which gives them historical consistence and meaning.”

poecilonym

n. a synonym for synonym

In the Ubang language of Nigeria, men and women speak different languages. They understand each other perfectly, but “It’s almost like two different lexicons,” says anthropologist Chi Chi Undie. “There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, then there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don’t sound alike, they don’t have the same letters, they are completely different words”:

English	Male	Female
yam	itong	irui
clothing	nki	ariga
dog	abu	okwakwe
tree	kitchi	okweng
water	bamuie	amu
cup	nko	ogbala
bush	bibiang	déyirè
goat	ibue	obi

Raised by their mothers and other women, boys grow up speaking the female language, but at age 10 they’re expected to switch, unbidden, to the male. “There is a stage the male will reach and he discovers he is not using his rightful language,” says Chief Oliver Ibang. “Nobody will tell him he should change to the male language. … When he starts speaking the men language, you know the maturity is coming into him.”

“God created Adam and Eve and they were Ubang people,” he says. He had planned to give two languages to each ethnic group, but after the giving two to the Ubang he realized there were not enough languages to continue. “So he stopped. That’s why Ubang has the benefit of two languages — we are different from other people in the world.”