Kirstie Bloody Allsop (Or How To Be A Trendy Peasant)

[Millymollymandy]

Posh = Someone who can afford to spend £23,000 (albeit hand -rather than sweatshop/mass produced- stuff).

So would you class someone like Katie Price (Jordan) posh then, who probably spends that just refurbishing one toilet.

As everyone has said, money has absolutely nothing to do with class. And Kirsty doesn't even talk with a plummy accent, just a normal what I call 'BBC newsreader' type of voice, i.e no accent.

[growingthings]

P O S H

"Port Out
Starboard Home

Its a travellers life for me P O S H P O S H "

Caracticus Potts definition of POSH

I just wanted to add that, I have nothing constructive to add to the discussion, but I am finding this confusion over the definition of Posh quite a read I'd never really thought too much of it before, but being the third generation of an immigrant family on my Dad's side from Norway, there was no accent only the one learnt in school (home counties!) and my Mums side are horse traders settled in the east, so she has a lovely thick accent, I talk like my Dad, my brothers accent is confused as being in the forces he mixes with people from all over the place and all walks of life. And my dear ol sis is a good ol norfolk gal livin in florida and its taken some time for her accent to mellow lol!

Does how you speak define you? Certainly not - but it definitely colours others opinions of you. Is that what its all about?

Oh I just realised that was fairly constructive

[Millymollymandy]

hee hee last night on the One Show they said that the port out starboard home thing was a myth! They were discussing nautical terms that have become everyday slang in English.

[Urban Ayisha]

its funny this talk of property posh or property rich... possibly the most wealthy people i know (the parents of a mate of mine) who live in one of these ginormous 8 bedroom victorian london townhouses in highbury and have got proper art on the walls and chandeliers and things buy the cheapest t*sco value food. funny what they see as important right? whilst we might be considered posh for buying anything we dont grow organic and/or fairtrade. and we're both jobless at the moment and living in a 2 bed flat in the not so posh west of london!

[MuddyWitch]

live in one of these ginormous 8 bedroom victorian london townhouses in highbury and have got proper art on the walls and chandeliers and things buy the cheapest t*sco value food

What my Gran would have refered to as ' Fur coat & no knickers!'

MW

[anarchistinslippers]

Someone once told me that the rich are only that way because they're tight.

[Thomzo]

If the average salary quoted was taken from the official statistics, produced by the Office of National Statistics, then it's derived from real data of all employees in the country, not a statistical sample. It's probably a little on the low side because it doesn't include other forms of income (self employement, cash in hand etc).

Oh and what exactly is wrong with being 'posh' anyway?

Zoe

[Wombat]

We get the show over here and we saw the first episode. It was a bit interesting but, yes, the trip home to the parents estate was an eye opener!

Nev

[ajs88]

Ha ha, my husband hates this programme.
I find it quite annoying, in one episode she claimed to have found a mirror in a skip. I mean honestly can you really imagine this woman in a skip.
In another episode we visit her parents house. Its a flamin mantion!! Basically a manor house!
Yet for some reason I still watch it!! I find programmes that make me angry with people quite appealing for some reason. I am also a fan of the Jeremy Kyle show and Underage and Pregnant!!

I'm completely addicted to Underage and Pregnant. I think it's because I find it quite heart warming, for the most part the girls are very loved by their families and after a differcult start get t grips with all quite well

The reason why I have a problem with 'Posh' is that it most commonly means unearned income and privalge. Everyperson I know who is posh, and I know quite a few of all ages, have a property that they've never paid for and shares that provide an income they will never have to work for.

Contrast this to the working poor, a poor education in contrast to those of the 'posh' and therefore working 40 hours per week (plush 5 hours unpaid 'lunch breaks' and apx. 10 hours travel) for often as little as £12,000 per year, then paying 20% tax which the rich don't pay, council tax, public transport costs, higher services and fuel costs (eg. poor postcodes do not get the deals that posh one do, poorer people have to pay more to borrow and poorer areas often have ATMs that charge £1.50-3.00) and then have to pay an average of £320 to rent a room in somebody elses house or £500-600 if they want to rent their own flat if they live in London as the working poor are no longer entitled to social housing unless they have children.

And what about the average family. Thanks to very genrous child benifit and tax credits families to do not have quite the hard time that the single working poor do. But the average, even middle class, family has to have both parents working full time just to afford a roof over their families head.

[Thomzo]

The reason why I have a problem with 'Posh' is that it most commonly means unearned income and privalge. Everyperson I know who is posh, and I know quite a few of all ages, have a property that they've never paid for and shares that provide an income they will never have to work for. .

Ok, but did they steal these things or go around killing someone for it? I doubt it. It just means that someone in their family probably worked bl**dy hard to buy the house and pay for the shares. I can't see how that is their fault.

Contrast this to the working poor, a poor education in contrast to those of the 'posh' and therefore working 40 hours per week (plush 5 hours unpaid 'lunch breaks' and apx. 10 hours travel) for often as little as £12,000 per year, then paying 20% tax which the rich don't pay, council tax, public transport costs, higher services and fuel costs (eg. poor postcodes do not get the deals that posh one do, poorer people have to pay more to borrow and poorer areas often have ATMs that charge £1.50-3.00) and then have to pay an average of £320 to rent a room in somebody elses house or £500-600 if they want to rent their own flat if they live in London as the working poor are no longer entitled to social housing unless they have children.

And what about the average family. Thanks to very genrous child benifit and tax credits families to do not have quite the hard time that the single working poor do. But the average, even middle class, family has to have both parents working full time just to afford a roof over their families head.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to pick on you but I get really fed up with people who bedrudge anybody who has a little bit of money. The rich do pay tax, and at a d*mn site more than 20%. They do pay council tax and they don't get tax credits. (And don't get me started on the subject of tax credits). Why is it that we hate anybody in this country who does well for themselves. It's no wonder the place is going downhill so rapidy.

Sorry to rant and please don't take it personally but we do seem to give more benefits and rights to murderers and hooligans than we do to people who have done nothing wrong, paid for everything themselves and never relied on benefits.

Zoe

[Thomzo]

P.s and just so that you know. I have decided to recultivate my 'poshness'. All this posh bashing has just made me more determined to stick up for what is now the new class of underdog.

I was brought up in the very centre of London. We were as poor as anything but had standards. My parents and I spoke with the local accent, which is sort of Kirsty Allsop meets a 1950's BBC presenter. When I moved to Wiltshire I was bullied for my accent so lost it by immitating everyone I heard around me. But I am now going to make an effort to get back what is my natural way of speaking. If Brummies can be proud of theirs (and they have every right to be) or Glasweigans can celebrate their accents, then why shouldn't I?

So be warned, I am going POSH!

Cheers
Zoe

[MKG]

Good for you, Zoe - or should I say Jolly D of you?

You are, of course, absolutely correct. But Posh-bashing isn't anything new - it's been around since the Norman Conquest. You just didn't shout about it too much in those days. What amuses me about it all are the varying definitions of poshness - sometimes rich people are posh (Alan Sugar - posh?), sometimes landowners are posh (well, I suppose the Duke of Cornwall is, but Madonna certainly isn't), and sometimes anyone with a Home Counties accent is posh. Generally speaking, I suppose, it's being different in a non-working-class way which makes people accuse others of poshness.

The situation was worsened by the BBC's one-time insistence on received pronunciation. No-one, but no-one, ever used that manner of speaking, apart from Deborah Kerr, but the Beeb made sure that everyone in the country thought that anyone in any position of authority did just that. So, a whole subsection of society made up of aliens - that's posh. The other thing which tends to turn people into poshists is the "times are hard - we may have to let one or two of the servants go" attitude. Very old joke that may be but, unlike received pronunciation, the attitude was genuinely held by a very small minority in this country. But they were the minority with the most land, the most money, and the most power, and were despised by everyone except members of their own clique.

Of course, this was all a long time ago. But how many people do you know who vote Labour or Conservative just because they always have, and their parents and grandparents before them? It's long-entrenched unquestioning viewpoints like that which still produce the knee-jerk anti-poshness. Error-ridden attitudes forged in the early 20th century are, maybe not too suprisingly, very difficult to get rid of.

My Mum still hates Germans.

Mike

[Millymollymandy]

Well said both of you. Have to say I really hate that old BBC received pronounciation accent but do like what I consider to be modern day BBC 'newsreader' accent - well that's fairly impossible to describe in writing but it's what I consider to be no accent! Not regional, not estuary and not received, not even Margo from the Good Life! Or maybe it's just that I don't notice it because I don't hear it as an accent and both 'posh' and 'common' equally stick out to me.......

Common! Now there's a word, I bet we'd not be allowed in this PC day and age to have a thread about common people, yet we're allowed to be rude as we like about posh people. I grew up being told not to do things because they were 'common'.

[the.fee.fairy]

I love received pronunciation! I've been training myself for may years to attain that level of speech!

Think John Cleese - perfect RP, Trevor McDonald - Perfect RP! I love it!

Maybe that's because of my educational background though, i have a degree in English language and Literature, and soe of the literature just doesn't sound right if pronounced in Estuary English (the fast-becoming new standard). However, some of the older literature is best pronounced in a northern accent - like Chaucer, if you read it as read, then you're getting close to modern day Yorkshire, and Shakespeare is getting close to modern day Standard.

I really love accents and how they come about, like the cornish deriving from Cornish itself, its really interesting, especially as some of the old words still hang around, even though the language is dead...A good bit of Hubbadillia anyone? Are we making a bit of a Brouhaha over accents?

Fab...At the moment, i'm really enjoying teaching English to Chinese people, its really interesting how their accents are shaped by those who teach them. At first, they called Zebras Zeebras, because they'd been taught by an american, but now i've started teaching them, they call them ZEbras.

[Green Aura]

I remember my old English teacher telling me that there was an area of Italy where they speak (in Italian of course) with what sounded like a Liverpudlian accent.