All we hear is Radio Carter - come and gossip about The Archers here

[PseudoBadger]

Hides in laundry rooms

Funny that Lily assumed Feebs was actually going to have a sleepover at hers rather than with a naughty night with Konstantin!

I thought that about sweets, and had to move my mental image of Haribo and lemon sherberts and liquorice allsorts and chocolate to cheesecake and Black Forest gateau.

I have been working with a Konstantin at work. It's making it difficult to picture someone with amazing lashes.

Well are cheesecake etc. puddings, desserts, sweets or cakes? It depends on what your parents called them IMO. Sweets is a bit old-fashioned I suppose.

What is going on with Phoebe? Isn't she supposed to be an adult? Lily sounds like her mum.

ppeat Nah, it's a class thing. 'Sweet' for 'pudding' is terribly infra dig.

It sounds like they've directed the actress playing Lily to imitate Elizabeth, which simultaneously makes her sound much older and a bit affected.

Yes, Lily's definitely a 'pudding' girl.

Incidentally, is it just me who winces in anticipation every time she gets into a car, anticipating some appalling pile-up? They will keep teasing us with grinding gears and graunching noises as she merrily does 90 on the sleepy, winding roads of Borsetshire. I'm sure she's going to be the death of someone sooner or later.

Yes 'tis true about pudding but it's not correct. Anyhow Liliy did well helping Feeebs avoid being IN the pudding club geddit

May not be 'correct', ppeats, but it's posh

"Yes 'tis true about pudding but it's not correct."

It is in Lily's and my world!

True for 'Spotted Dick' or Christmas type puddings, but not cheesecake or mousse\jelly type, they are possibly sweets or desserts.

Though like you Bertrand out of habit, and my mum saying it was right, I do call them pudding.

The french call them Les Desserts and Elizabeth David ,no less, calls them sweet dishes.

Surprisingly the french call napkins, serviettes!

Sorry, sweet or dessert is never "posh speak"

And yes, the reason "serviette" is not posh speak is precisely because it is the French word. The rule is never use a French word when there's an English one available.

I thought the rules were made up by unpleasant snobs like the Mitford family (esp. their disgusting father who wouldn't send the girls to school because they might begin saying notepaper instead of writing paper !) He wanted to differentiate themselves from the 'lower orders' by making up words that weren't known by everyone.

Ironic really when you consider that many, many years ago when the Norman court in England spoke Norman french, the English upper classes just followed along.

Yes, you're right. The rules are just ways of being able to spot "people like us".

I'm not saying it's pleasant or right or acceptable. I'm just saying what the ridiculous rules are. And "pudding" is what the sweet course of a meal is called, regardless of what it is. Dessert, if anything, is an extra course of fruit and nuts and so on, served with coffee and brandy. A sweet is a sherbet lemon.

The Mitfords didn't make it up, by the way. Nancy just wrote it down.

But those type of people did, like using the long A sound for pronouncing the word bath to put off the northerners (who use the short A sound which is correct if you think about the way we pronounce the Alphabet!)

Puddings refer to everything from treacle sponge to sorbet (don't know what a sorbet would be referred to if served between courses, but suspect Mitfords wouldn't have encountered such weird ways), dessert is fruit (eaten with appropriate cutlery). Just look pityingly at anyone who queries pronunciation and ask, quietly, as if something shameful, "Oh....do you not know about syntactic relativism then? Did you not..receive much of an education? Perhaps your parents didn't prioritise it?"

But back to Archers - Lily can't be that posh, or only shakily so. Her mum is the daughter of a farmer (and not even a mahoosive wealthy one like Brine) and a former product demonstrator, who married into a family on its knees and a breath away from losing the house which is its only claim to any kind of grandeur. Now it's hired out for weddings and decidedly non-U corporate events. Lily went to a shonky private day school, not even anywhere particularly posh. It's all very Normal for Norfolk, and not even as established as that.

So if she said sweets/dessert rather than pudding, no-one would be so surprised at her being slightly 'off'. (I do think this is all bollox, by the way, but you know - TA does rather invite this sort of tosh).

And while we're at it, a truly posh person would probably say 'water ice' rather than 'sorbet', unless they brayed it in a rather Kenneth Williams sort of way ('sor-baayy, hnnmm') to cover the awkwardness of using a French word, like a waiter.

Ahh. The English class system and its codes. Just...endlessly amusing.

Yes it is a load of bollox , that's why I like the fact that the french have never heard of napkins, I enjoy using 'serviettes'.

But back to Archers - Lily can't be that posh, or only shakily so.

I don't agree. The Archers are solidly middle-class, and I'm pretty sure that Elizabeth at least went away to school (wasn't there an anecdote at Nigel's funeral about how he helped Elizabeth sneak out one night?). They have always owned their own land.

The Pargetters were probably at one time the kind of landed gentry who were only a step below the aristocracy. IIRC before he died Nigel wanted the twins to go away to his old boarding school and it was Elizabeth who pushed for the cathedral school. Pretty solidly upper-middle class - and the lack of money is particularly smart!

I completely agree that it is all bollocks but the Archers is usually really good on class. 'Table of sweets' was particularly jarring because it came just before one of their many moments when they juxtapose the classes, with Lily's clumsy comment about needing space and Jazzer's assessment of her privilege after she had left. Susan, and probably therefore Emma, would say 'sweet'; the Archers and the Pargetters are definitely 'pudding'.

Let's hope Phoebe hasn't caught an std

Agree talk of "sweets" is more Grundy/ Carter although Susan is aspiring enough to know the middle clas and upper class talk of puddings, she'd probably go for "dessert" thinking it sounded posher.
Sweets is definitely for toffees and chocolates.

There are umpteen threads on MN about U and non-U usage - would it be too much to be asked to be spared on The Archers thread?

Not when a member of one of the supposedly poshest families on TA uses an obviously out of character and class word.
My grannie would talk about sweets so I'm not sneering at the word but Nigel and Elizabeth would never have used it.

Randomly the podcast for today appeared on iTunes at lunchtime. I was late leaving work and listened to it on the way home. When I was done and switched back to the radio I heard the last bit again! If they kee p doing this I may stay up to date and be able to post more.

So Phoebe is now pregnant by a picker. What was all that bullshit

about him telling her that there was a "problem with the condom" the next day? Wouldn't she have noticed at the time?