What makes someone middle class?

[lilibet]

Just had a conversation with a mate and a mutual freind has described themselves as middle class.

He works in a shop for a living, his parents work for a living, to me he is therefore working class.

I appreciate that a brain surgeon is obvioulsy a bit higher up the social strata than me ( I work in finance in the NHS), but to me if you have to work for a living you are working class.

Thoughts and opinions?

we live ina classless society anyway (i'm sure someone told me that)

He's just gross, Dumbie.

classless, smarshless

PMSL. How can this be a classless society? This whole thread proves the lie to that one!

it really doesn't bother me, like the royal family, we have always had it, i dunno

My DH and I describe both our families as the kind of working class families that think they're not.

fatfox, it's mamas&papas. I think it prides itself in being italian and all but honestly no one in italy has ever heard of it.

oh and definitely this is not a classless society. I've never cared one bit before nor felt as I was just an italian 'immigrant'. but since officially becoming a british subject myself (and dd) by marrying dh I started reading the signs. they're evrywhere, like this thread proves. and more so when children are involved.

So who buys all the jars of olives, focaccia bread, polenta and organic veg they sell in Morrisons, then?

I've always seen quite a mix of classes in there, personally. Could be because ours is in a "socially crunchy" area... and Waitrose is a bit far... On the other hand, down in Gosport where DW's brother lives, Waitrose is the normal high-street supermarket where everyone goes. ??

Supermarkets are bourgeois. Even my half-French mother admits this.

Do you mean bourgois? Common surely?

Most French towns have decent fruit/veg markets and old-fashioned boulangerie, etc. Supermarket culture isn't quite so insidious over there.

Oh god! How to translate that one . . . it's like trying to translate 'eminence grise' or 'une personnage'.

It's just . . . bah it is just bourgeois. Like engagement rings with huge diamonds.

we can make this country a non classless society - let' s have a big hug ahhh

So bourgious is something to look down on according to your mother? Is she aristocracy?

SEA, have you cleared up you living room yet?

epis's spelling is correct, DG!

i [heart] my living room

Bourgeoisie

The social class above the workers and peasants, and below the nobility; the middle class. ?Bourgeoisie? (and bourgeois) has also acquired a contemptuous sense, implying commonplace, philistine respectability. By socialists it is applied to the whole propertied class, as distinct from the proletariat.

Aristocracy! OH GOD NO!!! She is half-French. A couple of centuries ago, many aristocrats there were divested of their heads.

I had a nightmare the other day that my elder daughter married a man who was the son of a duke.

I was crushed! It took me a while to get over it.

I think "bourgeois" has become quite a pejorative word in French. Flaubert wrote: "the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois."

Bourgeois is showy and ostentatious. That is tasteless and attention-seeking. Yuk.

Sorry, i do know al that about the borjewarsie and also how to spell the word, but I am currently on overtime re my sleep.

Is bourgeois the equivalent of bling? Or a footballers wife?

Or is it actually showy and ostentatious and posh?

Compare a WAG with an IT girl...which is bourgeois?

I did a french exchange many years ago. The family asked me if I was bourgeois and I said no, thinking of all those negative connotations the word has in English. They looked shocked and said 'Oh, but we asked for a bourgeois girl!' I only later found out that it has a whole different ring to a french ear.

I'm not really sure how to translate it. I'm really not.

It's just what it is.

It's not footballer wife per se, b/c so many of those WAGS are so woefully uneducated.

It's just a sort of way of being.

obnoxious?