My dad and I started watching Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland today, on his request. We've only seen the first episode, but it's good.
It's very good, actually.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0ff7cg0/once-upon-a-time-in-northern-ireland
I appreciate that the BBC left the swearing in. If you can't swear about the Troubles, what the fuck can you swear about?
Besides, telling someone from here not to swear when they talk is like telling them not to blink. You'll only make them uncomfortable and they'll end up doing it anyway.
It's always a bit jarring to me when I see folk complain about bad language online, using phrases like "nobody has to use those words" and "it's always vulgar" and "it sounds uneducated".
Please understand: that is cultural bias.
it's also classist as fuck, imo, but I am told I need to stop turning everything into a class issue
(everything IS a class issue, you can fight me AND the chip on my shoulder)
Every British person does a subconscious class calculation when they meet someone, whether they admit to it or not. You want to know if someone is "like you" so you know how to speak to them and how to relate to them. But I mess up the calculations. I've got too many middle-class indicators now from being highly educated. (That's classism for you!) So swearing is, for me, often a way to reassure someone working-class that we're on the same level and can relate to each other as such.
It's annoying, though. I don't get angry at people much, but a close colleague once tried to joke that the Pulp song Common People was about me, having gotten the impression that my working-class indicators were the pretension, and not the middle-class ones. The idea that I might read as one of those fucking idiots who pretends to be working-class because they think it's "cool" drives me round the bend.
I also feel I need to explain, for Americans and other strange creatures, that class in Britain has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you have. You're born into a class and you're not getting out of it. It's your upbringing and your background and your language and your culture.
Your kids might be of a different class to you. Your grandkids certainly can be. But you're stuck with where you're born, and British society tends not to like it if you pretend otherwise.
Do not take this explanation for approval.
@astronomerritt I sit in this weird place where I was raised outside the UK and so I came to study here with this blind spot for class. Like, I would wonder why two sets of my friends, who seemed to have so much in common, just didn't seem to want to hang out together. 🙃
My accent codes me as middle-class, so you can imagine I was treated with some degree of bemusement at first by friends groups from working-class backgrounds. I was oblivious! I just thought it was clique dynamics of some kind.
Anyway yeah, from what I've come to learn I would definitely describe it as closer to a caste system than an economic one.
@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 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.
@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 @Tattie "at least we're not as bad as..." is the British defense against anything.
Call a Brit racist, see how long it takes them to point at the US. You might want to wear ear plugs for the sonic boom their finger will make.
@astronomerritt @Tattie I'm a Spaniard with a very weird accent in English because I have lived in Scotland and in the USA but most of my learning was academic or from films. In Spain I'm middle class.
Being extroverted AND neurodivergent, I get the impression that middle class people both sides of the Atlantic adopt me as a sort of pet. It was understandable as a University student, it's kind of weird in my late forties.
This was the wildest realization for me as I started to really dip into classic British lit. I had of course heard the phrase "your betters" before and thought it was a figure of speech; the idea that people actually thought (think!), in the face of a SUPERABUNDANCE of evidence to the contrary, that someone is literally better than someone else because their parents own land …
Even knowing for a fact that it's true, it can't be true.
@stevegis_ssg Oh, you don’t have to go all the way up to landowners. The things middle-class people have said to my FACE about working-class folk, assuming that because I sound educated and intelligent I must be one of THEM and not one of THOSE… christ.
And my partner is from West Belfast so they get it even worse. They don’t have the Westie accent any more because nobody would fucking employ them in a professional field if they did, but what this means is that people will literally mock the people and the accent in front of them. Because nobody from West Belfast could have a professional career, right? Not like any of Those People could be listening.
Anyone who doesn’t think classism is alive and well in Britain (and by association the North of Ireland) is deluding themselves.
Oh god the accent thing!
To a first approximation, all British accents sound the same to me!
@afewbugs @astronomerritt Kate Fox's _Watching the English_ (2004) may get into this, it's been a long time since I read it.
There *is* a similar class (socioeconomic status) system in North America (see e.g. WASPs, trailer trash), but it's not as rigid and doesn't have that history of aristocracy, landed gentry, etc. However, just as many North Americans pretend not to "see race" and, if they must, reduce it simply to "skin colour", they also "don't see class" or, when they do, reduce it simply to one's income, as if a lower-class "new money" person were of the same class as a moneyed WASP who went to a prestigious private school.
Paul Fussell's Living Room Scale from _Class_ (1983) is by now rather dated but gives you an idea: https://pigtown-design.blogspot.com/2011/03/living-room-scale.html
—yours, lower-middle
@nev @afewbugs That living room scale is FASCINATING. I kind of want to come up with one for the UK, but I think it’d be really regional and in Northern Ireland it would also depend on which side of the sectarian divide you’re on. (The Catholic working classes have pictures of the Pope and Jesus and Mary on their walls: Protestants have British Royal commemorative plates…)
I think the big difference between the UK and US class systems is that the UK’s is mostly “social” rather than “socioeconomic”.
@astronomerritt
It's also extremely rude. If I say fuck when I'm talking about something, and I'm not talking directly to anyone in particular, and certainly not directing robust language AT anyone, that's just word choice.
If someone makes it into a direct conversation with me for the purpose of criticising my word choice, that's interpersonal rudeness that is directed at someone, discourteous in multiple ways that merely saying fuck is not.
@astronomerritt @petealexharris
Hey, this is a really good point.
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