My wife and I are reading Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit Of Love (as AJP recommended back in 2012) and we reached a passage that prefigured her famous 1954 essay “The English Aristocracy” and the Alan S. C. Ross article it was based on, about U and non-U English:
Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.
Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it is. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’
Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’
Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to believe that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantlepieces, 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. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talking about notepaper – the irritation!’
Aunty Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.)’
For notepaper, mirror, mantlepiece, and perfume, see the list at the Wikipedia article I linked above; I don’t know what the problem with handbags is, or why one should not take sugar in one’s coffee or have a tassel on one’s umbrella, but I’m sure someone here will enlighten me.
It means she’s acting rich (or nouveau-riche?) Both coffee and umbrellas should be black and plain.
No, no, not rich but non-U. That sounds right about umbrellas, but why should one not take sugar in one’s coffee? Didn’t the posh set like sweet things?
I can never remember whether “looking-glass” is U or non-U, weighing Carroll’s Alice against Lennon’s Lucy’s plasticine porters.
[ETA] I could find a mnemonic; not bothering is a political choice
Definitely U; check the list. “Mirror” is non-U. Don’t fall foul of the fearsome Uncle Matthew!
The Pursuit of Love is thoroughly enjoyable (though I think one has to approach it in somewhat the same spirit as the Tale of Genji: a bizarre alien culture which one just needs to learn to roll with, but with recognisable and sympathetic characters nevertheless.)
I don’t think that Uncle Matthew is quite intended to represent the views of the author herself in these matters …
From my favorite poet,* who was very U:
* However, he never went to university, which I guess was a respectable option for impoverished but culturally respectable young men in the 1890s.
I don’t think that Uncle Matthew is quite intended to represent the views of the author herself in these matters …
Definitely not; she was a hawk-eyed observer.
I need to know more about the history of umbrella-tassel controversies.
@”she takes sugar in her coffee”
Never mind the sugar! What’s this shocking admission that young women are into coffee these days?
Civilized people drink tea.
*prescriptivist heart attack*
…wait, actually… do not let us hear, with let suddenly as the infinitive instead of the imperative, makes perfect “logical” sense. I expect U English preferred it for that reason.
“Don’t let’s” is pretty ordinary UK English; nothing especially U about it.
I say “let’s not”, but I suspect that is in fact a Scotticism. (I also say “it’s not” more often than “it isn’t”, et sic de similibus.)
Cf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Let%27s_Go_to_the_Dogs_Tonight The “don’t let’s” sequence sounds markedly Foreign to my AmEng ear.
Do snarky BrE speakers ever say “don’t let’s and say we did”?
As I recall, the junior copper in Strangers indicates his separation from previous standards by taking saccharine in his coffee. However, in keeping with the character of the show,* this isn’t depicted as good or bad, just different.
* It’s a cliche of cop shows and movies that they will start out investigating some minor crime, but it turns out to lead to something bigger. Strangers was much more realistic. Sometimes the bigger crime turns out not to exist at all. Sometimes it’s probably there, but they can’t prove anything and give up. And which main characters are involved varies from episode to episode. I described one episode to a friend as consisting mostly of two second-tier villains from George Lucas movies, General Taggi and Colonel Vogel, sniping at each other. They are two police sergeants, neither really by the book, but each convinced the other is the dirtier one.
@Y:
I think that would have to go “Don’t let’s, but let’s say we did.”
But “Don’t let’s” without a following verb is OK, I think (though not what my own idiolect would do.) It needs a suitable context to make the ellipsis natural, e.g.
Abel: “Do you fancy forming a Minimalist Program Appreciation Society right here in Chipping Sodbury University?”
Baker: “Ooh, yes! Let’s do that!”
Charlie: “Ew, no. Don’t let’s.”
I believe that handbags are properly just bags, but that sugar in coffee and tassels on umbrellas are non-lexical missteps, though I may be missing something.
Discussion of the reversed-polarity “do let’s” construction: https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2024/09/do-lets.html
As a former southern Englishman, I say ‘let’s not’ rather than ‘don’t let’s’. The latter sounds old-fashioned and somewhat posh to me.
PS Alexandra Fuller’s very good first book was titled “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.” For some reason, I thought the title was from a poem by Philip Larkin (old-fashioned, not posh) but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I hope that poor Fanny married somebody who appreciated her. Or nobody at all, that is also a better option than some weirdo nitpicker who has nothing better to do than to get upset at whether or not his wife adds sugar to her coffee.
There was a BBC adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, which I remember as being quite good except for an annoying linguistic detail: in the book, the protagonist’s mother (known as the Bolter as she tends to flit from one love affair to the next) pronounces the word darling as “dulling”. It’s a wonderful character cue because you can’t say it without pouting. But in the screen version they made her a central-casting aristo who drawls “dahhling”. (I guess it’s a version of the Tiffany problem — everyone knows English peers all talk like Lady Bracknell so you have to cater to that.)
Apparently umbrella tassels had been considered vulgar since at least 1856, judging by a piece in the magazine The Train that describes the standard garb of a “penny-a-liner”: “Whatever the state of the weather, he always carries an enormous umbrella, with tassels. Mind, there is no compromising this point. There may be no ferrule to the umbrella, or there may be no handle; or the umbrella may refuse to open, or may have an affection of the whalebones, which allows it only imperfectly to shut. But without a tassel, the umbrella would be to the ‘liner’ even as a pipe without bird’s-eye, an inquest without a coroner, a railway-smash without débris, a turkey, in short, without sausages.”
Brett quotes Walter de la Mare: ‘And specks of sale as bright to see’. ‘Sale’? It’s in many places on the internet, but I eventually found three times as many Google hits with ‘salt’ in the line instead. Also, the ‘salt’ version is much more common in Google Books.
Let’s see. I say Bike or bicycle, Dinner jacket (but never wear’em,) Jack (cards), Vegetables, Ice cream, Perfume, They’ve got a very nice house, I was sick on the boat, Mirror, Mantelpiece, Cemetery, Glasses, False teeth, Die and Pass on, Mad, Jam, Serviette, Lounge chair, Loo or Toilet, Rich or Wealthy, Cheers, Lunch (previously used Dinner (for midday meal)), Pudding, Lounge room, Writing-paper, Pardon?, Pleased to meet you, Radio, Teacher. Wireless has fallen out of my vocabulary. Note paper is different from Writing paper somehow. Mental is a bit slangy (?)
I’m thinking of picking up “Don’t let’s” as an affectation.
“Let’s not” is in my idiolect.
“Let’s not and say we did” I remember first hearing, like so much English, in The Simpsons.
“Don’t let’s” I associate with “Don’t Let’s be Beastly to the Germans”.
@mollymooly, bathrobe
Wireless is a word which I think was disappearing in Ireland in the 70’s, although it can still be heard. For me it is concrete, referring primarily to the physical unit.
Don’t let’s (go) = should we really (go), as in “should we really get lurid full-body tattoos in complementary colours?”
Between 1975 and 2000 the company name Cable & Wireless went from antique to cutting-edge.
Apparently the Mitford sisters called their parents “Fahrv” and “Muv” – I always thought th fronting was a characteristic of the language of the London working class, and not of aristocratic eccentrics.
Apparently, they were a weird lot even by the standards of the British aristocracy. One of the was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler who tried to commit suicide when England declared war on Germany, another a communist who for some reason settled in the USA.
Frances Wilson has an excellent description of them in this NYRB piece; here’s a sample to whet your appetite:
We listened to the ‘wireless’ in my childhood (50s/early 60s), though oddly the original listings magazine has always been ‘Radio Times’.
I presume “Farve” in the NYRB piece represents /fɑːvə/, Cockney “father” with /v/ instead of /ð/. (If you want something pronounced /fɑːrv/ you should spell it “Favre”, like Brett.)
I went on a Wikipedia wander from “Mitford family” to “Edward James” (whose wife Tom Mitford had an affair with) to “Not to Be Reproduced”. a Magritte painting of Edward James, of which WP says
I am tempted to change it to
I presume “Farve” in the NYRB piece represents /fɑːvə/, Cockney “father” with /v/ instead of /ð/. (If you want something pronounced /fɑːrv/ you should spell it “Favre”, like Brett.)
That doesn’t make sense — it has to be /fɑːv/.
I presume “Farve” in the NYRB piece represents /fɑːvə/
No, /fɑːv/ (cf “muv.”)
[Ninja’d by Hat.]
Like Kate Bunting, I, too, listened to the wireless as a child. (We did have one made out of Bakelite: it would be positively wrong to call such a thing a “radio.” “Radios” were those things with transistors instead of valves.) This was not a U/non-U thing. My coal-miner grandfather said “wireless” too.
Wireless (pronounced roughly as in English) still seems reasonably common in spoken Gaelic (at least on Radio nan Gaidheal), but not in written, which is partly why I can’t spell it.
(I actually say quite a few of the U words, but I think I’m coming at it from the other – working-class – end.)
‘don’t let’s’ here is just the plural equivalent of of ‘don’t let me see you doing X’, isn’t it – not ‘let’s’ as a suggestion.
No, /fɑːv/ (cf “muv.”)
Interesting. My thinking was why not “farv”? (cf “muv”). The answer being that standard English spelling resorts to final -v only when no alternative spelling is possible. Standards may slip for non-U family slang, but not for U. Yes, /fɑːvə/ would have been “farver”.
@Michael Vnuk: There were a number of little mistakes in the text of that poem in the source from which I copied it. Most of them I spotted and corrected. However, it’s not always easy to proofread a text I already know by heart. I see* that in addition to missing “sale” for “salt” (when I was paying more attention to making sure the spelling of “lambkins” was right), I also overlooked another mistake. In the second stanza, it should have “grains,” plural.
* One mistake I did catch was “see” instead of “seed” at the end of the “grains” line. In fact, I think all of the errors in the text involved missing or incorrect final characters. That suggests there was some kind of systematic OCR problem with the ends of words, followed by an automated spellcheck.
A question we haven’t wondered about is how U people addressed their parents-in-law. Ross says,
So for once Uncle Matthew and Ross disagree.
Perhaps oddly, I can't remember what my parents called their parents-in-law when speaking to them, though we saw my grandparents fairly often.
I always find it odd when people use Christian/given names (by themselves, rather than in collocations like “Grandpa Steve”) for their elder relatives. Obviously I don’t think it’s wrong, it’s just something I didn’t grow up with. (For that matter, I don’t like it when doctors and the like address me by my given name, but that ship sailed decades ago and I put up with it — though I get my revenge by addressing offending doctors by theirs, if I have the chance.)
It should? On what basis? “The smallest grains of mustard seed / As fierce as coals of fire” doesn’t exist anywhere on the web or in Google Books, only “grain”. Despite being compared to the plural coals, the singular grain parallels the singular dewdrop, hair, etc. (And, of course, “a grain of mustard seed” is singular in the New Testament.)
As I recall, in A Swiftly Tilting Planet,* Meg is still trying to figure out what to call her mother-in-law. She doesn’t care for any of Calvin’s younger siblings, seeing them as short, dark, and sickly, unlike the tall, red-haired, athletic Calvin.** Her kids call her “Mom,” but Meg thinks that sounds like an insult coming from anyone but Calvin.
* Not recommended.
** When Calvin’s refers to himself as a “sport” in A Wrinkle in Time, to Meg’s surprise, it’s the first indication that he’s not a dumb jock.
@ktschwarz: It looks like you are correct. I was going by my memory of the text, which had apparently made it plural in parallel with “coals.”
I wouldn’t have understood that at all. It… doesn’t parse.
Do you mean it’s explicitly second person plural as opposed to singular?
I think she means first-person plural—We don’t want to hear about the note any more—and I disagree with the interpretation, though it makes sense. I don’t think people contract “let us” when it means “allow us”, but parents do give commands with “Let’s not”.
one of my precious few blog posts is about “let’s know”.
That’s weird.
Lady Bracknell of course mentions a handbag more than once.
@DM I parse it as “Let’s not [do it] and say we did.”
Yes, exactly.
First person exclusive, if that’s the word I mean. ‘Don’t let your uncle and me hear…’
You can give inclusive-we instructions – ‘don’t let’s think about it any more’ – but that doesn’t make sense here, because Fanny is not to talk about notepaper, not not to hear about it.
I wouldn’t elide the ‘u’ there, but I wasn’t assuming that meant no one could.
Also, I thought DM was the one who first mentioned that interpretation!
(‘Let’s hear no more about it’ would be unremarkable, I think?)
Sure, but that’s not something I’d ever have guessed. It probably violates a good dozen linguistic universals and disproves twice that many Chomskyan theories.
I don’t think I’ve encountered it, because
. What do you think of “let’s know”?
Impossible (in my English).
I’d heard of Nancy Mitford before (of U and non-U fame) and apparently there is a TV show about her family now — https://time.com/7297784/outrageous-britbox-oswald-mosley-true-story/ — it was apparently streaming just last month. One of Oswald Mosley great-grandsons was executive producer.
Yes, the Frances Wilson NYRB piece I linked to above (August 12, 2025 at 8:08 am) is a review of that show.
@DM “Let’s not and say we did” is a response to a suggestion starting with “Let’s [verb phrase]”, so I can see where trying to figure out what if any ellipsis was occurring divorced of that context would be confusing. I would still imagine/hope it would be perfectly parseable in context.
As with mollymooly, I got it from the Simpsons. Marge is in a local theater production of a goofy musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire and has gotten a little too into her role (projecting her sublimated anger at Homer’s loutishness) and so has begun enjoying attacking Ned Flanders with a broken bottle during rehearsals. I can’t find a clip handily, but for the dialog belong he is standing in-character shirtless, wearing a bandage pinpricked with blood from her first breakthrough attack, and irritating her by recommending clemency and understanding for Homer:
Marge [angrily smashing a bottle]: Forget about him. Let’s rehearse the bottle scene.
Ned [worriedly backing up, looking anxiously at the bottle neck]: Let’s not and say we did, hm?
languagehat : I didn’t realize that what you were quoting was a review of that show.
Like many Americans my age I learned English from the Pythons. One oft quoted line is certainly „let‘s not bicker and argue about who killed who“. In the 1970s „let’s not“ appears to have been normal colloquial English.
In my own southern English idiolect, I think there is a distinction between “let’s not” and “don’t lets” which is approximately analogous to what I was told at school was the Latin distinction between “nonne”, question expecting the answer Yes”, and “num”, question expecting the answer “No”. (Complication that occurred to me much later: classical Latin, like Celtic languages, lacks words for Yes or No, but the distinction remains valid.)
In the “let’s” case, the distinction seems to me between “let’s not do that” (speaker expecting hearer to agree) and “don’t lets do that” (speaker being more emphatic on account of thinking it possible that hearer may not agree).
Don’t know if that would hold for Americans.
Americans don’t really use “don’t lets.”
wireless/radio: While Modern Hebrew uses a transliterated radyo, I recall seeing in an old battered pocket version of the Ben-Yehuda dictionary the term “אלחוט” (alchut); a calque of wireless (al being the privative prefix ; chut meaning “wire”)
Hebrew wikt doesn’t have it; Hebrew WikiP has “תקשורת אלחוטית” tikshoret alchutit, “wireless communication”, but not the older term for a radio.
Morfix has it.
Ha — I just checked my old (1960s) Ben-Yehuda and sure enough, it has אלחוט.
I’d have to check e.g. the historical newspapers, but as I recall אלחוט didn’t catch as a word for plain old radio, like wireless in BrE, only for things like wireless telegraph and two-way communications.
Americans don’t really use “don’t lets.”
This is true, and yet “Don’t Let’s Start” was an early single by They Might Be Giants. I don’t think I clocked it as a Britishism at the time, it just sounded a little strange. John Linnell and John Flansburgh, in a recent AV Club interview: