To think it is posh and or pretentious to say you are "drawing" a bath?

[OonaStubbs]

What do you think. My DP always says this but I think it is very strange and old fashioned to say this instead of just saying you are running a bath?

The word draw can mean to pull, as in drawing something towards you, so drawing curtains can make sense,

It’s also where drawing the bath comes from, drawing the water from the water source to fill the bath.

My husbands grandparents said it, as does his parents and so does he - my kids will sometimes ask if I can draw them a bath - it’s not pretentious it’s just something they’ve heard all their life 🤷🏻‍♀️

Like a horse-drawn cart

Excuse me?

Salt and pepper.

Drawing a bath does seem more old fashioned than drawing the curtains.

Why is correct speech considered pretentious? We are at risk of losing the richness and diversity of our language, so I think it's great that older phrases are surviving. I do draw the curtains, though not a bath.... I am so inconsistent!

DC started announcing they were going to “draw a bath” about 2 years ago, coinciding with reading The Famous Five for the first time! We also had quite a few picnics and “lashings” of ginger beer for a month or so. Sadly we’ve moved on to hideous Americanisms and baths are now “run”…

Yes very pretentious. I’d be repulsed if my husband said that!

I run a bath and draw the curtains. I also brush my teeth unlike my husband who scrubs his teeth! Makes me think of someone furiously scrubbing the floor with a scrubbing brush

It is old fashioned but not pretentious. The adding of indoor baths for the majority is within living memory. The 1967 House Conditions Survey found that 25 percent of homes in England and Wales still lacked a bath or shower, an indoor WC, a sink and hot and cold water taps. But by 1991, only 1 per cent of households lacked one or more of these.

If you were born pre1967 into a deprived area, you’d likely have childhood memories of physically drawing a bath.

My gran would say draw a bath. But she grew up in abject poverty in Liverpool.

I was once charged with being pretentious by a South African colleague for saying "we ate it for supper". He said "my wife's English and she calls it dinner" 🙄
Well, we ate it before going to bed, so not the same, and "English" encompasses so many different cultures, classes and variations. I could not convince him that this working class Northerner was talking about some bedtime snack. He was a bit chippy though. 🤔

Surely, it's all about common parlance, and what you grew up with. It was only when I met DH that I realised five and twenty past three, was not the usual way of talking about time; because that's how it was said in my family.

Condiments does not just refer to salt and pepper but to mustard etc.

Exactly. And in some poorer areas people were going to the village/neighbourhood pump, filling up buckets, pouring it into large stock pots on the stove and heating up water to fill a tin bath in the front room to take baths. Which was usually on Saturdays so you’d be clean for church on Sunday. During the week, people would just use a washcloth and basin of hot water to clean themselves. Many baby boomers lived their childhoods like this.

Indoor plumbing in the first half of the 1900s was an indicator of middle or upper class. The better off had indoor plumbing and so would run a bath.

Running a bath vs drawing a bath are linguistic class markers.

Isn’t it good manners to say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes?

I have no idea why it matters which is said when you both know what the other means. Sometimes it seems some people look for a reason to throw class in on benign phrases.

@phoenixrosehere No. Bless you isn’t good manners. It’s a saying! It has no meaning and certainly isn’t on a par with “thank you” or “please”. Very few young people say it. Like drawing a bath. Most younger people have no experience of where the saying comes from which is drawing water from a well.

Everywhere else uses close curtains, run a bath.

No, they don’t.

I’m not sure why you think these expressions are only used in England

Being critical about other people’s language is such a common habit of many, and it’s so rude.

This is one example. The determination by a fair chunk on here when people use something commonly used by someone who is Scots or Irish that it’s a “Americanism that’s crept in” is another.

Very few young people say “bless you”? Why would you think that?

In 20+ years of working in schools that’s absolutely not my experience at all.

Salt, pepper and mustard.

For me, condiments is an overly technical word for everyday things. Like hot beverages for "tea and coffee and things like that."

"Would you like a hot beverage?" = what a robot might say.

The broadest point to "draw" from any linguistic discussion on Mumsnet is that many people are stunningly ignorant about any class/geographical dialects beyond their own.

And often very adamant that any difference is right “wrong” or simply doesn’t happen.

I grew up very poor working class in the 50s & 60s and remember most people using words such as lavatory/lav, sofa, living room; over time these became toilet, settee and lounge. The latter were somehow considered superior and aspirational!