My dad and I started watching Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland today, on his request.

[chrisradonc@social.vivaldi.net]

@astronomerritt
I grew up in West Central Scotland and went to a comprehensive school. On account of my good exam results I applied to St John's College, Cambridge and went down there for an interview. I had no idea which college to apply to, or on what basis such a decision would be made, so I just chose the one Douglas Adams had been to.
I turned up with a clean shirt, wearing one of my dad's ties. All the other candidates seemed to be wearing suits and carrying copies of The Economist.
I was not offered a place.

[daveybot@mastodon.scot]

@astronomerritt Gosh yeah. Never mistake manners for principles, eh?

I was also thinking about this in the last week as more and more songs came out regarding the recent horrors in Minneapolis.

(@WiteWulf had a great summary of them: https://cyberplace.social/@WiteWulf/115977684267122313)

I liked them all, but for pure effectiveness and impact of message, you really can't fault the Waterparks track.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@Tattie God, I’ve nothing but sympathy for an outsider being forced to navigate this shit! It must have been so WEIRD from the outside. (Although I worry about calling it a caste system — I don’t think it’s that openly oppressive, I don’t want to act like my experiences were anything like being low-caste in India, for example.)

My parents worked their way into management roles, so they had middle-class friends, and it never struck me as weird that they’d drink in the social club with one set of mates, and then they’d drink in the nice pub with ANOTHER set of mates, and those sets almost never crossed or overlapped. Before I even had the words to describe it I knew that those friends were Different. It’s so fucked.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@chrisradonc You couldn’t have summed it up any better than that. And I sympathise. I had to work out literally everything about my post-secondary education myself because my parents, bless them, had no idea. Folk often don’t understand just how much of a leg-up you get from having the right parents and going to the right schools.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@daveybot @WiteWulf I’ve been meaning to go through them! It’s a great list.

[chrisradonc@social.vivaldi.net]

@astronomerritt
I ended up studying medicine, a field dominated by the middle class. I found that few of them spoke like me.
As Ken Loach observed, "The problem is that the British middle class is obsessed with swear words."
https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/2012/ken-loach-the-british-middle-class-is-obsessed-with-swear-words/

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@chrisradonc Ken Loach is, as he is so often, absolutely correct.

[chrisradonc@social.vivaldi.net]

@astronomerritt
Many years later, I still feel that medics look down on oiks like me.
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h383

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@chrisradonc There is a huge difference between swearing WITH someone and swearing AT someone, and it absolutely baffles me that articles like this will treat the two cases like they're remotely similar.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@SturmUndDranger @tess Just one of the many reasons you couldn't pry me out of Ireland with a crowbar. Even here in the North the class system is less of a ballache than it was in SE England where I grew up.

I used to be an academic, however, which meant I was interacting with a lot of middle-class English folks.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@cursedsql Yeah, you guys absolutely have a class system but it's based on totally different principles, and I think this leads to misunderstandings -- we're using the same words to describe different things.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@HarriettMB @daveybot amen to this, if you'll pardon the joke.

[dave@alvarado.social]

@astronomerritt @cursedsql not internally anyway. The UK has been pretty shit to...pretty much everybody else, under that same system.

[tattie@eldritch.cafe]

@astronomerritt ach, it was weird but it was fine for me. Because of my accent I would tend to fall upwards, with my social clumsiness probably being seen as endearingly naive.

What prejudice I did suffer was based on my last name; the occasional "you speak English so well!" comments. 🫩 But this only tended to happen when people saw my name before they met me. First impressions are powerful.

My wife used to sing Common People to me, which at first irritated me before I accepted the truth of it— I had privileges that she would never have, and if I didn't understand them I was quite capable of acting like a privileged wanker. I learnt that there were things she could say that I should not.

I observed how she had been the first person in her family to go to university, but despite their congratulations they had passive-aggressively undermined her until she dropped out. I heard how her mother's private reaction after meeting me was to ask if she was really "good enough" for me? I saw how my career accelerated while hers hit the class ceiling— always an assistant, never a manager.

And tho I don't want to minimise the horrors of the caste system in India, I have no patience for white Brits who tut and scold about that system, without recognising that in Britain, too, the circumstances of your birth denote the life trajectory and career you are "supposed" to have, and that British society as well will act to prevent class transgressions.

It is, as you say, extremely fucked.

[srlevine@neuromatch.social]

@astronomerritt If you haven't read (or listened to) Melissa Mohr's Holy Sh*t you might enjoy it. Her whole last section goes into the intricacies of class swearing and who makes these sort of statements (and why).

[crcollins@writing.exchange]

@astronomerritt

I always found the singling out of certain words that either mean the same as or rhyme with other words to be extremely nonsensical. Never understood it, and people whining about "vulgar language" just makes me want to use it more.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@dave @cursedsql Oh, the Brits are fantastic at oppression. They did it at home first, and then they exported it.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@Tattie God, your poor wife! No wonder you were furious for her: even her parents were acting against her with that peculiar crab-bucket sabotage working-class folk can be so very good at. I’m furious too. It’s such fucking bullshit.

My parents both broke that ceiling, so I at least grew up knowing it was possible, but I also saw what it cost them: a price in time and effort and graft that none of their middle-class friends had to pay to reach the same level. And there was far, far too much luck involved.

You’re right, too — white Brits should learn to recognise that they’re part of an oppressive system before they tut at other countries for having one. Especially when British fucking colonial rule is responsible for it.

[astronomerritt@hachyderm.io]

@SRLevine I’ll have to check it out! Thanks 💛

[nxskok@cupoftea.social]

@BenCotterill @astronomerritt @purplepadma for me it's "in the class of insults used at school" (when I went to school), so definitely not.