Language of age and social class

VOCABULARY EXTENSION II

The words in 1.6 are more unusual words and are most likely to be found in writing. Give a synonym for each word that would be more likely to be used when speaking.

Answer these questions.

Match the words on the left with their opposites on the right. Use a dictionary if necessary.

Exercises

1 altruistic unsystematic

2 diligent generous

3 intellectual thick-skinned

4 methodical unhelpful

5 morose flexible

6 obliging low-brow

7 quick-tempered selfish

8 sensitive cheerful

9 stingy placid

10 stubborn lazy

1) Which animal represents you? To what extent do the characteristics apply to you?

2) Think of a friend and find his/her animal in the chart. Give examples of why you think each characteristic is appropriate or not.

EXAMPLE: My friend is a rooster. I think he is industrious because he worked very hard to find a lot of information for a research project he had to complete at college. I don’t think he is shrewd because someone tricked him into investing in a non-existing company.

1.3. Arrange all the adjectives and descriptive phrases from the chart into three columns under the following headings:

describe me might describe me do not describe me

1.4. Which people does the speaker have a positive opinion of and which a negative one?

Let me tell you about my new colleagues. Pat, my boss, seems very astute and witty. I find her deputy, Vince, a bit parsimonious and work-obsessed. I share an office with Julie who's a bit sullen and mulish. I also do a lot of work with Sam who's very tolerant and generous.

1.5. Now imagine that someone else is talking about the same people, but sees them in a different light. How might he or she describe them?

EXAMPLE: Pat is very shy and terse.

1.6. What are the abstract nouns from these adjectives? Use a dictionary if necessary.

1 altruistic 3 diligent 5 industrious 7 gallant

2 parsimonious 4 placid 6 sagacious 8 terse

9 morose 10 unscrupulous

EXAMPLE: altruistic - unselfish

In English, certain expressions will date the speaker or place him/her in a particular social or age group. People are often judged on the way they speak and listeners may decide that the person is either posh (upper class, negative) or common (lower class, negative). Here are some disapproving words which are used to comment on a person's class.

Expression	Refers to	Comment
a pleb	lower-class person	adjectives plebby (informal) and plebeian (formal)
an oik	lower-class man	Implies bad behaviour
riff-raff	lower social class	Implies lack of culture
hoi polloi	ordinary people	excludes the rich or the educated
the chattering classes	well-educated middle- class people	implies readiness to express an opinion on any subject
bourgeois	middle class	implies someone who is narrow-minded and materialistic (can also be used more objectively in a historical context)
the upper crust	upper class	people with money and influence
stuck-up / snooty	behaving in a snobbish way to lower-class people	implies someone who thinks that he or she is better than other people
new money	people who have recently become rich	implies spending money in a showy way
a toff	rich upper-class person	usually used humorously

People often continue to use the expressions that were popular when they were young. Cool! or Wicked! are the current terms of approval, whereas in the 1940s it was Spiffing! ­Similarly, the words people choose to use for inventions may also date them because older people may continue to use a name that was the everyday word in their youth but which has since changed. Thus, some older people may refer to a car as a motor (car), to a radio as a wireless, to trousers as slacks.

In general, older people, particularly older people from the upper classes, are more likely to use one as a pronoun, often where the meaning is really I: One doesn't always agree with what she has to say.

Social class in English affects vocabulary choice in some possibly unexpected ways as certain words are, for no obvious reason, held to be either common or posh, depending on ­your point of view.

Luncheon, for example, is an upper-class version of lunch. Toilet is considered by some people to be a more lower-class way of referring to the lavatory or loo. Addressing parents as Mother or Father rather than Mum or Dad also suggests that the speaker is likely to be upper class. These distinctions are probably less marked than they used to be, but you come across them in works of fiction where they may be used by writers to indicate the social background of their characters.

2.1. Choose the best word or expression from the box to fit each sentence.

bourgeois chattering classes oik common

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