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.

@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