Classy Language.

“I want changes to produce across the whole of this country a genuinely classless society so people can rise to whatever level from whatever level they started.”         John Major, 1990

Champions of making our society classless are fighting an uphill battle.  Classism is deeply ingrained in us; it shows in the very language we speak.

My master is of churlish disposition,

And little recks to find the way to heaven

By doing deeds of hospitality.

                                            [Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.4]

O sleep! O gentle sleep!

Nature’s soft nurse…

                                           [Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2, III.1]

Those two quotations from Shakespeare are a case in point.  Describing someone as ‘gentle’ is a compliment, whereas ‘churlish’ is definitely not.  Both terms come from social ranks.  ‘Gentle’ is associated with the upper echelons of society, as in ‘gentleman’.  ‘Churl’ is from the Old English ceorl, a countryman or peasant, someone right at the bottom of the heap.  Digging down to the root of ‘gentle’, we find even more social demarcation and exclusiveness.  It’s from the Latin ‘gens’, meaning a race or tribe – in fact it shares this root with both ‘genetic’ and ‘gentile’. 

Many of us will think of Jews in connexion with the latter word, and, perhaps, of Jews not marrying Gentiles (usually Christians) for fear of debasing themselves.  Gentile, in this sense, has exclusionary, negative connotations.  We find similar connotations in ‘barbarian’.  For the Ancient Greeks, anyone outside the Hellenic world was a barbaros, or stammerer – someone who couldn’t speak properly, in other words, who couldn’t speak Greek.  So, ‘barbarian’ meant ‘foreigner’, but it was not a neutral word – the Greeks thought (and not without reason) that foreigners were inferior beings.  Nowadays ‘barbarian’ means uncultured and boorish, and is almost as bad as ‘vandal’, which itself is the name of a particular ancient tribe.

But back to class.  Literally.  Class comes from the Latin classis, which was a division of the Roman people (it also meant ‘army’ or ‘navy’).  It can be used objectively, as classroom teachers and sociologists do.  But it does have its subjective side.

“She’s well classy, ain’t she?”

To have class is really to have upper class – to be refined, glamorous, to look and behave nobly, to have breeding.  We can’t get away from the idea that moral and intellectual superiority is attached to social breeding – it’s all in the blood, y’know.

Having said that, the word ‘noble’ is probably derived from the Latin verb noscere, to know.  Top ‘nobles’ would be those who had achieved fame by their great deeds and not their birth.  They then might go on to have children, who would, therefore, be ‘gentle’.  The noble parents would, no doubt, wish their children to be ‘generous’ (also from that genetic root), and ‘frank’ – which, as it means ‘free-born’, they couldn’t fail to be.

As well as not being churlish, a noble’s children must avoid being vulgar or common (both smacking of hoi poloi, as the Greeks say).  At all costs, they mustn’t slip into villainy – derived from ‘villain’, another peasant.  However, if a damsel is kidnapped by a villain, she might be rescued by a knight, from the Old English cniht.  This meant a serving-boy – the Germans’ version is a ‘Knecht’, which still means a servant or farm-labourer.  The fact that a cniht rose high enough in England to become what we know as ‘knight’ shows that linguistic social mobility is possible – a glimmer of hope for Mr. Major?