In 1954 Professor Ross, a latter-day Henry Higgins, published a lengthy essay called “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English” in the Finnish philological periodical, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. His argument was that aside from “minor points of life” — such as “the games of real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea” and “having one’s cards engraved (not printed)” — the only remaining class distinction in post-war Britain was spoken language. Today, he argued, a member of the upper classes was “not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class”, he simply spoke differently. And thus to guide those keen to distinguish between the language spoken by “gentlemen” from those “persons who, though not gentlemen, might at first sight appear, or would wish to appear, as such”, Ross created the terms “U” (for upper class) and “non-U”.

The first part of his essay, “The Written Language”, is effectively a style sheet: how to correctly address an envelope and begin and end a letter; what to call, in correspondence, a Duke or a Lieutenant Commander; the correct use of “Esq”. “Knowledge of at least one initial of the recipient’s name is, of course, a prerequisite for addressing him with Esq.” The writer “will be in a quandary” if he does not have this information: “in these circumstances I myself use the Greek letter ø (as ø. Smith, Esq), but this is probably idiosyncratic.”  

Ross gets into his stride in the second part, “The Spoken Language”, which starts with pronunciation: U-speakers say “temprilly” rather than “temporarily”, “goff” rather than “golf”, and “tar” rather than “tire”.

Next comes an alphabetically ordered vocabulary list in which the middle classes are shamed. Here we find non-U “serviette” versus U “table napkin”, “toilet” versus “lavatory”, and “mirror” versus “looking glass”. While a U house must have a name rather than a number, the names of many houses are non-U: “Fairmeads”, for example, or “El Nido”. “U-children” and “U-dogs” eat their “dinner” in the middle of the day when their U-parents and owners are having “lunch”; “pardon” is non-U: the U response after belching should be silence. A non-U speaker cannot, Professor Ross argued, become a U-speaker, because the misuse of “one word or phrase” will give him away (“for U-speakers never make mistakes”).

Alan Ross was a U-speaker in a non-U university. Born in Brecon in 1907 and educated at Malvern College and Balliol, he worked during the war at the government code and cipher school in Bletchley Park. It was as an undergraduate that he lay the foundations of his study of English linguistic class signifiers, working on it for his own amusement while developing his lifelong interest in Finno-Ugric languages. Like Nancy Mitford, whom he met at a luncheon (“old-fashioned U”) in 1955, Ross was famously witty. He had employed in his article, he revealed to Mitford, the class distinctions made in her autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love (1945). Fanny Logan, Uncle Matthew complains, is picking up “dreadful expressions” at school such as “note paper”: “What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother”. Uncle Matthew is famously unreasonable, but on this occasion even the conciliatory Aunt Sadie agrees with him. “Fanny darling. It is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.” The case of the Mitfords proved Ross’s point. Far from being “better educated, cleaner, or richer” than their non-U neighbors, the single proof of their social superiority lay in their peculiar use of language: the Mitfords employed a vocabulary understood by no one outside the family circle, while the “Mitford voice”, even they admitted, was ridiculously posh.

Nancy Mitford responded to Ross’s essay with an essay of her own called “The English Aristocracy”, published in Stephen Spender’s Encounter (September 1955). The upper classes, she explained, did not use fish knives or put the milk in first when pouring tea. Silence, she agreed, was the U response to belching, as well as being “the only possible U response” to other “embarrassing modern situations”, such as being told “it was so nice seeing you” after saying goodbye. She would tear up any letter beginning “Dear Nancy Mitford”, rather than “Dear Miss Mitford” or “Dear Nancy”. To Ross’s vocab list, Mitford added “sweet” as the non-U version of “pudding”, “sofa” as opposed to “settee”, “glasses” and “dentures” as the non-U equivalents of “spectacles” and “false teeth” (U-speakers dislike euphemisms).

The September 1955 edition of Encounter sold out instantly. “U” and “non-U” became the buzz words of the day, and newspaper letters pages were filled with the responses of readers. “It is sad to find”, Graham Greene wrote to The Observer, “that by Miss Mitford’s exacting standard Henry James was often non-U in his correspondence. Frequently he allowed the “unspeakable usage” of writing to someone as “Dear XX”. Henry James, Mitford explained, “was an American”. Another letter to The Observer pointed out that Shakespeare had made clear, in Richard II, that in fact “mirror” was U and “looking glass” non-U:

King Richard: An if my word for sterling yet in England
Let it command a mirror hither straight…
Bollingbroke: Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.

To this, Mitford replied: “It is probable that Richard II, like many monarchs, was non-U”.

It was Mitford’s idea to republish in book form a shortened version of Ross’s essay together with “The English Aristocracy” as Noblesse Oblige. “It seems like a natural for the Xmas market”, she wrote to Heywood Hill. Illustrated by O. Lancaster and entitled ‘‘Are You U?”, the volume also included a letter by Evelyn’s Waugh and other satirical delights such as John Betjeman’s “How to Get on in Society” (“Phone for the fish-knives, Norman”). Malcolm Muggeridge, editor of Punch, devoted almost an entire issue to the book. The magazine’s cover bore a mock coat of arms with the device “Snoblesse Oblige” and a coronet was printed at the top of each page.

Why does Noblesse Oblige continue to sell and make us laugh? One reason is that the English have always enjoyed the comedy of our intricate class distinctions, particularly those within what George Orwell called in 1920, “the lower-upper-middle classes”. Another is that Ross gave us a snapshot of the end of an era, after two wars had dramatically altered our social structures. England in the Fifties had a Labour government, and the Angry Young Men, disaffected offspring of the Bright Young Things, were documenting the new equality, which included the democratization of language. Four years after Noblesse Oblige appeared, academics were called to the witness stand at the Lady Chatterley trial to explain that the word “fuck” was not, in the right context, obscene, while the judge, Mervyn Griffith-Jones (U), caused nationwide hilarity when he instructed the jury to consider whether D.H. Lawrence’s novel was the kind of book you would “wish your wife or servants to read”.

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Noblesse Oblige has dated in the 70 years since its publication, but surprisingly not that much. Middle-class men are now less likely to play tennis in their braces, and we no longer have either (the U-pronunciation is “eye-ther”) jerries (U) or chamber pots (non-U) to contend with. But status anxiety is still with us. I wince at the word “toilets”, for example, and “serviette”, despite not coming from the top-drawer myself, and am always, like society decorator Nicky Haslam, on the look-out for things that are “common”. Haslam’s special-edition Christmas tea towel, “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common”, include social crimes such as “side plates”, “Confidence”, “type-2 diabetes”, “Bach”, “Loving your parents”, and “Primrose Hill”. Remember the tabloid furore (the “e” in “furore”, according to Haslam, should not be pronounced) when Carole Middleton, mother of the Princess of Wales, said “pleased to meet you” to the Queen, rather than “How do you do”?  

Linguists today talk about standard Southern British English (SSBE), Estuary English (EE) and Multicultural London English (MLE) rather than U and non-U, but there is still a U way of speaking. The Queen’s English is now the King’s cockney, with public school boys saying “wanna”, “gonna”, and “wa’er”, while a 2025 update of Noblesse Oblige would include the U pronunciation “twenny-twenny five”. The copious use of the word “fuck” is now very much U. 

Mary S. Lovell writes in The Mitford Girls that Alan Ross, who died in 1980, “resented” Miford for “making fun of his serious academic thesis”. This is surely not the case, and Lovell offers no source for her statement. The whole notion of writing what Ross ironically called a “scientific” disquisition on upper-class lingo was parodic (“U-dogs”, for example). Trading on his celebrity, Ross produced three further books on the theme: What Are U? (1969), How to Pronounce It (1970), and Don’t Say It (1973). His grandson, Carne Ross, who resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret evidence to an official inquiry into the use of intelligence before the 2003 Iraq invasion, has since become an advocate for anarchism. “His accent”, writes Anthony Andrews in an interview with Carne Ross for The Observer, “is now faultlessly demotic, but he says it wasn’t always like that.” One-downmanship is the new one-upmanship.