Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English. A lot of French words flowed into English as a result.

But even today, if people use the words of French origin rather than the old English words, one is regarded as being from the upper class, such as using 'purchase' instead of 'buy'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...

View on HN

The tendency to use "fancier" vocabulary has actually been noted as a tendency of the non-Upper class. Cf. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

The language of aspiration. I like to think that "re-architect" is non-U.

People also use something like that to mask a lack of knowledge / experience / understanding / intelligence. Once in a while someone uses big words so well it's poetry, but those people are the exception.

Technobabble is a prime example of that. (Star Trek TNG is a hilarious example of pseudo-science jibber jabber.)

Tech the tech!

It's interesting to watch how, in a big tech project, a director or architect will occasionally start using a word like "corpus", "idempotent", "assert", etc. and it will trickle down the layers of the team. By the time the keypunch guy is using it, it's gone out of fashion, like last year's suit.

Knowing this, it's fun to purposely mispronounce words to see if it will catch on...

Go all the way IMO: make up the words and see if they catch on.

Absolutely! I'd like to add, high culture is also used as a term for cultures that are insular and use lots of culturally specific vocabulary. The Southern Culture and accent is actually considered high culture by many anthropologists! By the same token... So is tech culture... Even when it's really annoying stupid fat lazy and mysogonistic and repeating the same problems in a different language that were solved before computers were even invented!!! Wrap your head around that one!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-context_cultur...

I never thought I'd say that rare pepes are elements of high culture.

> Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English.

This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!

Cultures vary from country to country, but the elites, they're all one and the same.

That's the reason for the animal/meat duality, right?

Such as pig/pork, beef/cow. The working classes spoke English and dealt with the live animals, the elites just ate them.

chicken, duck, goose, pheasant, squab / poultry?

One of those doesn't belong before the /:

Pheasant: from Old French fesan. (the current french is faisan).

This is a funny aspect of English. In general, we distinguish the meat of mammals (beef, pork, venison, mutton, ...), but non-mammals are their meat (fish, chicken, ...).

But I don't think this is well explained by a class distinction. I mean, the classes of people who raised sheep weren't so different from the people who raised chickens.

However this comes with the interesting caveat that the English upper classes don't like to appear too French, especially when it comes to pronunciation, where using the foreign pronunciation can be considered rather lower class. This is reflected in class shibboleths such as:

Upper class: valet [val-ett], fillet [fill-ett]. Middle class or lower: valet [val-ay], fillet [fill-ay].

Upper class: claret [clar-ett] (from French clairet). Middle class or lower: Bordeaux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com