Many many people do it: hotly deny an upbringing in a middle class area, insist the school they went to was pretty rough, argue all the points of why they're working class and not middle class, and get upset when someone insists that they are after all middle class. Do you do it? Have you in the past? Why?

No, mine was deffo a working class upbringing. I have nothing against middle class though.

What would YOUR class upbringing be Cosy?

never tried to pretend I was working class.

middle class people who do are just being middle class (i.e trying to better themselves). The reason that they will talk up their working class credentials or their upper class credentials is that they perceive them to be somehow superior to their own values.

Working class conjures images of honesty, straighforwardness, reliability, community.

Upper class conjures images of wealth, privelege, connections and leisure.

Whereas middle class conjures up images of mediocrity, anonymity, diy, 2.4 kids, frivolous nik naks and poor taste.

So it's no surprise.

Having said all that what do we mean by class? It's a tricky concept.

I was brought up in poverty, because my father died from an industrial disease when he was 37 yrs. of age. He went from riches to rags because his trade ( A spring knife grinder ) killed him when still a young man.

In 1910 he was taking £100 per week home, running his own business, a factory in endcliffe woods untill ill health claimed him.
I have always regarded myself as working class and proud of it, but I do not have any problem with any other class, either middle or upper class.

I am not jealous of other people's wealth or envious of what they have, in fact I am happy for them and wish them well, all this being angry because of other peoples possessions is fruitless and a waste of time. I am not going to pull myself to peices over something that is beyond my reach and can't do anything about!

Don't know, honestly:lol: :lol: From the swamps of Louisiana to the oilfields of Texas...things change. I didn't have a static upbringing.
What interests me is watching people argue heatedly about it. Never making their lives out to be more comfortable than they are, but instead fighting to see who can beat who at the 'well i had to walk twenty miles barefoot every day, well we ate shoe leather when we couldn't afford anything else' stakes.
Is it because people believe adversity breeds character?

(or are all my friends just really odd:lol: )

Either they're odd or they've watched too much monty python.

"When I were a lad we'd get up at 2am , half an hour before we went to bed, eat a handful of hot gravel and then father would cut us in two with carving knife"

(or something)

I don't get class at all, really. Are you what your parents were, or do you get a promotion for doing a bit better yourself? Can you not split all the classes down into further classes? What if you own your own home and both work but have no money at all left over for anything else? Are you middle class? Lower middle? Working? Who apart from maybe those who've inherited vast family wealth or who reckon the state owes them a living, doesn't work? So in that case isn't everyone who works in some way working class? Or does it depend on whether it's 'blue collar' or 'white collar' work? What if you work in jeans and a t-shirt and don't own a collar at all? Does it have something to do with your salary? Etc etc etc....:lol: :o

No, I reckon it's like Phanerothyme says it's a stereo type thing.

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
Either they're odd or they've watched too much monty python.

"When I were a lad we'd get up at 2am , half an hour before we went to bed, eat a handful of hot gravel and then father would cut us in two with carving knife"

(or something)

Both those answers hit the mark:lol:
I'd forgotten those particular sketches. See, I'm not the only one who's noticed it!

If it's a stereotype, why pick a class at all?
If we don't like them, couldn't we just make up new terms?
Like 'mostly comfy' if you live all right but don't have much spare cash for a life.
Or 'shoe chewing' for those years when you're living on the edge and don't know where the next meal is coming from.
Or 'Living it large' when you can afford to throw some money around
:lol: :lol:
Then we could change our descriptions as quick as we change circumstance

I think you might like "Making of the English Working Class" by EP Thompson.

Definitions of class depend on who you're talking to. A marxist historian will say one thing, Burkes peerage another.

Some define class simply in terms of profession. In this country the Ad men and the government use the A-E system based on profession and disposable income.

I think the terms working class etc, have ceased to have any meaning beyond being loose stereotypes for sectors of society, whereas a hundred years ago your class totally defined what you could do with your life. That's still true to a certain extent, but class mobility is much easier now.

Working on my 'New Terms for Your Niche in Society':
I may be about to illustrate how much more wonderfully flexible my new system could be by personally dropping straight from Mostly Comfy, past Shoe Chewing, all the way down to Oh No This is Bad. :lol:

Everyone out there who said they didn't support charity - well, it's personal now. I'm coming to get you.:twisted:

I support charity, I support charity.... dont get me!

Incidentally, any jobs on offer for your charity?

Fancy joining the class Oh No This is Bad?:lol:

Actually there may be...in other projects. Try the Local Jobs Boards. I can't keep up with other projects stuff. Helps if you're good at Environmental stuff:P

Local Jobs Board? And I'm damn good at environmental stuff thank you!

I know people that aspire to be working class, people that aspire to be middle class and people that aspire to be upper class. I know people that would get offended if you labelled them as any of those things. And then there was Tania in Big Brother who said "I'm working class" when she clearly has no class at all.
At the end of the day, trying to bracket yourself or other people into any pre-defined stereotype is a pretty fruitless thing to do. You are what you are, people are what they are.
In an ideal world. we will one day live in a society where the contribution you make to the world around you reflects more upon you than the amount of money you earn or the upbringing you had or the job that you do. This is what John Major was referring to when he stood outside Downing Street and stated his aim of having a classless society, that is what Tony Blair was leaning towards when he came to power talking of creating a meritocracy. Unfortunately they both failed because it is a sea change in British attitudes that will take years to rectify.

Back to topic (I need a little emoticon that wags it's finger sternly)

Any more new terms for my new classes? Any guilty admissions to bigging up your lower class origins even if you don't have any?

as someone said the the generally used ABC1C2 class system may have been of use in the 19thc early 20thc but has become completely meaningless.
An example is the term middle class which basically covers anyone from the most menial clerk in the dole office or poorly paid teacher to the public-school educated types with a couple of expensive houses and a family full of majors etc
This is obviously nonsensical and the vast majority of the former (the lower middle class)'s wider families will be generally working class and they will still have more in common with the upper middle class than they ever do with the upper middle class. Similarly most of the upper working class will feel they have nothing in common with those "below" them or the underclass...to use a politically incorrect expression.

I think the meaninglessness of these terms can be traced back to the accessibility to brighter members of the working class of grammar school places starting in the 1930s or 40s.

The redundancy of the term is shown in my own history as I suppose in their terms I myself was working class for the first nearly 30 years of my life - working on building sites, in factories and doing delivery jobs etc but since moving up here to go to university I suppose I've now joined the hallowed ranks of the middle class.

One final thing that always makes me laugh is the Daily Mails continual outrage over perceived damage to the "middle class" usually connected to private schools etc when its a fact that their readership is lower middle class with an scattering of working class of the type who have no connection with public schools. And the type of being who send their children to the public schools are the readers of the broadsheets who wouldnt be seen dead with what theyd see as a grubby little tabloid.

Gloworm, your final paragraph makes interesting reading. It seems the Daily Mail, the Daily Express (owned by pornographer Richard Desmond) and the Times (owned by pornographer Rupert Murdoch) are all trying to out middle-class each other, but with limited effect.

Perhaps they are aware their readership is lower-middle class, but want to give their readers something to aspire to?

I'm definately from a working class background but people I know in real life don't believe me half of the time! I live in a stone built cottage you see and as its seen by others, it appears huge. (It isnt massive really, just 3 bedrooms) Some people at school used to think I lived in a mansion until I told them otherwise!

Pants... Phanerothyme beat me to the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen quote, lol. Here's the whole sketch script, anyway, just for a luagh or two...

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort.
Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.
Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, eh Gessiah?
Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.
Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
Palin: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
Chapman: A cup o' COLD tea.
Idle: Without milk or sugar.
Gilliam: OR tea!
Palin: In a filthy, cracked cup.
Idle: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
Chapman: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
Gilliam: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
Palin: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."
Idle: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiny old house, with great big holes in the roof.
Chapman: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
Gilliam: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!
Palin: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
Idle: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.
Chapman: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
Gilliam: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
Palin: Cardboard box?
Gilliam: Aye.
Palin: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
Chapman: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
Gilliam: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
Idle: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
Palin: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

Interestingly, you can even change your class within your own lifetime.

I was born probably working class but aspiring middle class, to a young couple in a small starter home, who had both come from council house backgrounds. I then became middle class because my parents became professionals at work and bought more upmarket homes etc. Then I graduated from Poly (being that educated makes you middle class) then I married an unemployed not-working class man, who was probably a bit lower than working class and we went to live in a little terraced house (like Corrie). That moved me back to working class again, if you allow for the one-time definition of women taking the class of their spouse. Having been divorced many years and living in a nice home and having a professional job, I am back to being middle class again.
It is a heady old world

In answer to the original post, politicians often talk up their working class credentials, JP, the DPM for instance, who lives in a big flash house with lots of conspicuous consumption and has nice things round him and a great salary, pretends to be working class.

It is definitely about
a. street cred and
b. aiming for support by association "he is one of us"
c. aiming for support by being someone who has "made good".

JP is clearly middle class by any standards of definition, although of course you cant buy taste which is where some people get confused.

Louise