Posted on 04/18/2007 8:46:28 AM PDT by dead
Poor Kate Middleton, dumped by the second in line to the British throne then displayed humiliatingly to the world as Prince William's "practice chick", the mere recipient of some of his wild oats. But judging by the astonishing Pommy snobbery unleashed in the week since the break-up of her almost five-year relationship, Middleton, 25, is well off out of it.
British newspapers are full of quotes from the supposed upper classes about how Kate was too "common" to marry William, 24.
Her mother, Carole Middleton, was "pushy, rather twee and incredibly middle-class", according to a royal source quoted by the Daily Mail.
Mrs Middleton's crimes? She says "Pleased to meet you" instead of "How do you do", "toilet" instead of "lavatory" and "pardon?" instead of "what?".
Senior courtiers at Buckingham Palace were said to be whispering that Carole, a former flight attendant who married a pilot, was really "not the thing". Therefore, nor was her daughter, despite the fact that Kate has behaved impeccably in the five years since she met William at university in Scotland and moved in with him.
Another element of Toiletgate, as it has been dubbed, is the claim that William's friends used to mock Middleton by whispering "Doors to Manual" whenever she entered a room, a dig at her mother's trolley-dolly past.
"There'd be jibes asking Kate if she was going to wheel in the trolley and when the food service would start. All pretty juvenile stuff, but these are former Eton chaps who are permanently stuck in that sort of humour."
The snobs are anonymous but there is a ring of truth to the slurs, which have a long history in Britain, as a contrived way of separating the anxious U (upper classes) from the aspirational non-U, terms immortalised by the English author Nancy Mitford in a 1956 essay.
The U might be under threat of extinction in the new classless Britain but the fact its secret code remained un-cracked by bourgeois Carole Middleton and her daughter apparently is cause for crowing celebration in the aristocracy, a sign that all is not yet lost.
"I am a firm believer in people marrying into the same class," the self-described aristocrat Kishanda Fulford wrote this week in the Daily Mail, which described her as "the wife of Francis Fulford, whose family has lived in their stately home for 800 years", and obviously has never had to buy his own furniture - another distinction between U and non-U.
"There is no confusion over what time 'dinner' is and what to call the 'loo'… There are many pretty girls from the lower and middle classes who have married into the aristocracy, indeed, Duchesses past and present have bloodlines which could be considered as ordinary as Kate's - but they never ended up queen."
According to another "insider": "Carole's whole approach is very aspirational. But re-laying your front drive and trimming the wisteria around your front door isn't going to make your home, or your daughter, fit for a prince."
Ouch.
Seen from a middle-class meritocracy such as Australia, the attacks on the Middletons are bafflingly petty, especially when William, his brother, Harry, and their mates are so often seen behaving with as much class as Paris Hilton.
Last month, for instance, British tabloids ran a front-page photo of William posing for the camera while squeezing the breast of a young woman - not Kate. His pick-up line is reported to be: "Hi, I'm going to be king; d'ya fancy a pull?", which may, of course, be an urban myth.
The more we see of the Queen's descendants, the less suitable they appear to be to reign over an egalitarian country such as ours.
Of course, there is goodwill and sympathy for William in Australia, mainly because of the tragic end of his mother, Princess Diana. And it is silly for the British press to chastise him for doing what practically every other man his age does - extending his promiscuous bachelor days as long as possible.
Still, as the British TV agony aunt Denise Robertson wrote this week of the break-up: "There are undertones of 'droit du seigneur' - a maiden dishonoured and then discarded."
It is an old-fashioned concept, but Middleton's fate is a salutary lesson for young women contemplating shacking up with the love of their lives rather than holding out for a firm commitment.
In 2005 the median age at marriage for Australian men was 32 (up from 26 in 1985), and for women it was 29.7 (up from 24) and leaving a shrinking window of fertility. In the expanding period of singledom, cohabitation has become an almost mandatory stepping stone to marriage. A whopping 76 per cent of couples (69 per cent in NSW) who married in 2005 had been "living in sin", as they used to say.
But the idea of "try before you buy" gives all the advantages to men, who get the benefits of marriage with none of the responsibilities. They get sex on tap, domesticity, companionship, and probably nutritional and hygiene improvements. They can test-drive the merchandise for as long as they like.
But for women, the immovable biological fact of declining fertility means the deal is inevitably unfair. And if marriage comes at all, it often is a utilitarian choice after all the magic and mystery has been used up in a tenuous coexistence in which neither partner fully trusts the other and one foot is always out the door.
If Middleton had really wanted to marry William she never should have set up house with him. Smart girls don't give away marital perks free.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
I only wish that were true.
That's because your role as a child was to be subordinate to your parents. Oh that we had more of that! And I wish we had more parents who treat their children as subordinates...
One thing that drives me nuts are all the young women who swoop the ends of their sentences into interrogatives. Everything is, like, a question? It is a way of asking permission to continue speaking, as if to say, "Okay? Do you want to hear the next part of my story???" Very submissive and common, to use the British term. Confident girls and girls who expect to be taken seriously don't do that.
The way we speak reveals volumes about ourselves: where we're from, how we were raised, our values, our interests, our cultural circles. Even in America, adopting another class of speech is risky: it's either hilarious or a car wreck (ref. Imus). And it's one area the self-improvement/makeover industry completely overlooks.
Or as my farming grandfather put it, if you can milk the cow through the fence why buy it?
The inbred royals must have another doddering inbred.
I'm getting strong vibes here of Patricia Routledge's Hyacinth Bucket (prounced, "Bouquet").
I had that argument once with an English "teacher", who thought she was correcting my sons grammar when he replied "what" to a query. She argued for an hour rather that admit she was wrong. Finally she "agreed to disagree", rather than admit she was wrong. She never corrected anyone for saying "what" after that however, although there ARE more polite ways of answering a query other than saying "what" that aren't submissive, but it was probably beyond her abilities and training to figure that out.
She took seriously what was poked in fun.
Guys do it, too, including my husband. It drives me bats. I, on the other hand, was brought up by a man who said, "That's the end of the sentence, you can let your voice drop!" (I've been known to shout this at my husband, when I have drink taken.)
A FReeper once said that he thinks they learn it listening to NPR.
Kate Middleton is HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So...I would be spotted right off as middle class when I said, "I gotta take a crap"?
No, “crap” is a euphemism, too.
( . . . speaking as the proud descendant of Alabama dirt farmers, myself. But they were genteel Alabama dirt farmers . . . )
Or ref. Hillary "I don't feel no ways tar'd" Clinton.
Come on now. Just because she was a commoner does not mean that she wasn’t rich. Her father is worth millions. Plus she seems so nice to me that she probably chipped in every now and again.
Interesting how even different areas of this country differ in that particular form of speech. In the South, we were taught to say “Excuse me?”. When we visited our ‘Yankee’ cousin, who had grown up in Providence, after not having seen him for over 10 years, we were amused that he and his friends would say, “Please?”, instead of what we’d say in the same instance. It confused us, at first, then we realized what he was saying, and why.
Wow! You get it. Imus thought he could hang with the bros. The bros knew he was being a wannabe, but used the opportunity to obfuscate the issue with charges of racism and sexism.
I cringe when I hear pasty-faced white boys on FM radio trying to sound like urban blacks. They sound like fools.
A man should be comfortable in his own skin.
well no, not really. There's always the sewer. That's where gutter people select their lower class wives from, and can always feel better by having still another lower class to look down at. /s
My roots are lower middle class/working class. My dad wouldn’t have said “crap”, though. He would have said “dump”.
It's amusing to my friends that, after almost 20 years, here in MA, I still talk like a Mississippi gal. I tell them it's because I'm ornery, and why would I want to talk like them, anyway? ;o)
I speak the way I’ve been spoken to until recently... the dreaded youse came out of my mouth when I was helping a resident. Sheesh if my mom heard me say that, she’d glare at me hotly and ask, ‘What is a youse?’ Yet, all the residents say it because it seems to be an oldtimer Pennsylvania thing.
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