E and non-E
December 2009, Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald
People have been struggling with their manners ever since British author Nancy Mitford seized on the terms U and non-U to delineate the behaviour of the English upper classes.
Mitford meant to be funny with her rulings about what was upper class, or U, and what was non-U, but her essay, published in 1955 in Encounter magazine, so terrified and bewildered her readers that, all these decades later, people are still insecure about how to speak and behave.
Etiquette – knowing how to say goodbye or, indeed, choose your cutlery – became confused with good manners – knowing how to treat other people. Now it’s a jungle out there.
“No-one knows what good manners are any more,” complains a man who teaches at one of Sydney’s best private schools.
The converse of that though is that too few understand what bad manners are either.
The result is what we’ve just seen in federal and state parliament. It’s been high drama in both Canberra and Sydney, but you can sense that most of Australia has been watching with appalled wonder. It’s as if we’d shyly invited some Quite Important people to dinner only to see them turn into chimpanzees chucking crockery around the room.
What’s most disturbing is realizing these parliamentarians feel entitled to behave as they did.
In January, the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an RAAF female cabin attendant cry when she couldn’t provide the dinner he wanted. This newspaper recently reported on a lawyer in the queue for the Ivy bar, drunk, behaving obnoxiously and bragging about how much money he made. The principal of SCEGGS, Darlinghurst, where annual school fees for Year 12 are over $20,000, gave a speech to parents in which she asked them to show more respect for her teachers.
Who are these people?
Nancy Mitford and U and non-U
Mitford had adopted the terms U and non-U – originally coined by a Birmingham linguistics professor - to describe what set the aristocratic class apart. She meant the way they used silence in the face of the embarrassment; ignored money; and said “lavatory”, which is U, instead of “toilet” (non-U), “pudding” instead of “sweet”, “vegetables” not “greens”.
But now, in a more uncouth age where money, profile and power are to today what class was to yesterday, society divides more brutally. Forget Mitford’s U and non-U, with its whiff of bygone speech, ancient houses and silver fish knives. What we have instead is E and non-E. Entitled and non-entitled.
The former PM, Paul Keating, irritated by a second request from Good Weekend’s picture editor to go in a group picture to mark the magazine’s 25th birthday sent a surprising message via his assistant. She emailed: “Mr Keating regards these group shots with bucket loads of fake bonhomie as naff in the extreme. And with people, only some of whom, would he find any common cause.”
It’s a perfect example of E-type behaviour however well he may behave at other times.
Classic E-types think they are entitled by their position, privilege or bank account, or all three, to their bad manners and to use them on people they have deemed to be non-E. That is, people who don’t have the same position or money. E-types act in a way that few of us could get away with. Nor would we want to.
There is a variety of E rudenesses: talking over the top of you, picking at their ears, looking over your shoulder when they’re introduced – sorry, when you’re introduced to them; ignoring emails that need answers; getting their PA to call and put you on hold (even when you’re a friend); treating business acquaintances with more consideration than their family; doing favours grudgingly; suffering memory loss about non-E types unless they need something from them; paying bills slowly and only after reminders; using call-waiting; and double-parking on busy shopping streets (“I’ll only be a second”).
There are plenty more – send on a postcard, please – and E-types may do any of them with huge confidence in their right to do so. They rarely feel shame.
Will you object? Well, you think you might but you probably won’t. E-types have more power than you and better connections too.
Rich and rude
A businessman friend, who spends his life dealing with bankers, shudders at the idea of the holiday season’s Eastern suburbs parties. “Full of rich people who are rude,” he lamented. “And the trouble is there’s no redress, is there? If you say something, there’s a scene and that’s not helpful at all. So you end up putting up with it.”
The global financial crisis has only made things worse by making it clearer who is E and non-E. How pleasant to roll down Sydney’s Martin Place knowing your bank account is okay and so many others aren’t.
In The Good Society, published in 1996, economist J.K. Galbraith presciently wrote, “Money, voice and political activism are now extensively controlled by the affluent, the very affluent and the business interests…”
Nothing has changed.
Much of Australia has escaped economic woe for various reasons but there are pockets – casuals, people who’ve changed jobs or just entered the job market– who’ve suffered. A Sydney University’s Workplace Research Centre survey discovered a trend of employers cutting back on pay and entitlements for new hires. Sixty percent of employees didn’t feel they could negotiate their pay or conditions when they started a new job. Fifty-six percent of full-timers felt they were now expected to work harder, produce more, for the same money. The WRC, says senior researcher Sally Wright, believes the trends provide a window to the future.
Walking past Cook and Phillip pool, on the edge of the Sydney CBD one hot day, I couldn’t help over-hearing a young man on his mobile, a Brazilian student dressed in the black trousers, white shirt uniform of the casual hospitality worker. He was complaining bitterly.
“Yew mak me fil like sheet, yew know,” he protested into his handset. I wanted to tap him on his shoulder and tell him he might be in a foreign land but he wasn’t alone. There are many people out there right now who make us all “fil like sheet”. Indeed, it seems to be how some E-types measure their status.
The more of an E you are, the more badly you can behave.
People either want things from you, or their livelihood and happiness depend on you.
The Kerry Packer effect
Social psychologist Dr Dina McMillan notes, “The person who’s the most prosperous is treated as the leader of any group. We often don’t realise how we’re reacting but if we were filmed, the dynamics would be clear.”
We give Es more floor-time and we laugh louder at their jokes.
If the late Kerry Packer, once one of the biggest E-types on earth, so much as smiled at people instead of failing to notice they were in his way, it was enough for recipients to claim they were charmed.
We forgive E-types a lot, says McMillan.
This is probably why a banker friend calls E manners “f*** off etiquette”.
What’s so astonishing is that many E-types have read their Nancy Mitford. They pride themselves on knowing what’s what. They’re probably partly responsible for the plethora of etiquette guides since the publication here of The Penguin Book of Etiquette by Marion von Adlerstein seven years ago.
E-types are acutely aware of the social brownie points accrued by sending a bouquet of flowers from upmarket florist Grandiflora or a treat from high priced grocer Simon Johnson to say congratulations. They are scrupulous on the finer points of sending thank-you cards or choosing the right personal stationary. They know how to eat an artichoke.
But they think manners are something to be put on and off, like a stylish coat or hat. Their conduct is calibrated to the status of the person on the receiving end.
As a result, they have worse manners than swine-herds.
One celebrated architect friend is mostly on the receiving end of his clients’ good manners, partly because he has exquisite manners himself but more significantly, because he is rich and successful himself and his name on a design confers prestige. He watches in amusement though as the E client who is being so polite to him switches to rudeness with an underling, sometimes without drawing breath.
“The veneer suddenly drops away and you see the horrendous person underneath,” he remarks.
How to be polite - and very, very rude
Some E-types will use their manners to put other people in their place.
A while ago, a well-off woman visited a friend’s home for a large dinner. Another guest was admiring the tall windows in my friend’s small Victorian cottage. “Yes,” sighed our hostess, as she looked around at the inevitable bits of grunge that little old houses acquire the way the elderly get rheumatism, “but I’d love a spare $100,000 to fix everything up.”
Her queen bee guest looked around with distaste, as if she’d found herself in a brownstone tenement rumbling with rats. “Oh, I don’t know,” she sniffed, “you could probably do it for ten.”
She then scoffed her dinner and later sent a thank-you note on thick, creamy, expensive card.
Actor and novelist Julian Fellowes, who also wrote the screenplay for The Young Victoria, captured one such E-type in his novel Snobs. “She could leave a roomful crushed and rejected and yet congratulate herself on behaving perfectly. It is of course of all forms of rudeness the most offensive as it leaves no room for rebuttal.”
Real manners, of course, begin with concern for the comfort of the other person. They show respect for another human-being.
So what has happened to us?
Seriously???
Whoever practises behaviour like an E-type – lavishing Bollinger on some; a cold shoulder on the rest - has misread their Nancy Mitford. They still think she was serious when she wrote that famous essay. At the time, Mitford wrote to a friend: “I’ve been asked to write a hugely long article for Encounter on the English Aristocracy. Can’t quite decide, but if I do it will contain volleys of teases.”
Mitford’s piece began with the serious work of Professor Alan Ross, and the paper he had had published in an Helsinki linguistics journal in which he argued that the upper classes then could only be distinguished by their language.
Mitford’s article was funny and ridiculously snobbish but it provoked a huge response as aspirational English readers worriedly reviewed their vocabularies.
She eventually became bemused by the attention, and wrote to her friend Evelyn Waugh nine months later, “Can you get over them going on with U? I mean really we’ve had enough – even I have & you know how one loves one’s own jokes.”
E and non-E is not so jokey.
U and non-U was about the habits of a small privileged group of people who were losing their power in the social turbulence of the Fifties as aristocratic wealth faltered and the working and middle classes started pushing towards the informality and supposed classlessness of the Sixties.
E and non-E is what actually happened once the muzziness of the Sixties and Seventies dispersed.
People still strain upwards like Mitford’s anxious readers, but upwards is no longer quite where it once was. It’s politically incorrect for a start to mention class except in advertisements for luxury apartments, watches or cruise ships triple the size of the Titanic.
Instead the key question now is: how much loot do you have?
Real money
E and non-E describes a new social system based solely on money and power. In this tightly focused world, there is no room for people to “redeem” themselves by their studies, knowledge, goodness, public service or achievement in fields where the rewards are insight rather than lucre.
Social researcher Hugh Mackay once heard a bunch of millionaire businessmen disparaging a professor he admired himself because “he didn’t have any ‘real’ money”.
If, according to Mitford’s definitions, someone was non-U because they said “home” instead of “house”, (or “hice”) it simply meant they didn’t belong to the upper classes and nor could they easily pretend they did.
But if someone is non-E, it has come to signify that they’re powerless, worthless.
Sub-layers of E-types have developed, like mutants roaming a grimly transformed landscape. These people may not have money, but they’ve been given power over you and me by the E-types above.
I mean the people who answer the phone when you have a problem with your bank account, credit charges, mobile phone, internet or whatever. Or they’re newly hired by your employer to get you to fill out forms and yet more forms for things that once just happened with a phone-call.
Then there are the E-types like the airline staff who forced paralympian Kurt Fearnley to crawl through Brisbane airport because they insisted he check his wheelchair and theirs wasn’t suitable for him.
This pyramid of E-types has produced one final layer: people so consumed by frustration that they feel entitled to behave badly too. Cyclists whizzing along pavements; non-attentive shop assistants; the ill-spirited in general …
In the end, in fact, too many of us, over-worked and under-resourced and driven mad by all the above.
In the Fifties, U and non-U made its presence felt as it trickled down. E and non-E has left its fingerprints on us too.
It’s just a pity that more is now at stake than what to call a cauliflower.
First published December 12-13, 2009, Spectrum section, The Sydney Morning Herald
