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[quinterbeck]

In the East Midlands it's similar, but there are also clear differences in pronunciation. To take our most famous dialect phrase, "hey up my duck" [eɪ ʌp mɪ dʌk] shows both h dropping and the use of [mɪ] for "my".

I would say I hear [eɪ ʊp mɪ dʊk] more frequently than [eɪ ʌp mɪ dʌk]. Despite having the foot-strut split in my normal accent, I always use the foot vowel in "Ay up". I picked up more of my mum's SSBE accent than the local East Mids accent. For me those are clues that I fall into the middle class, rather than the working class that most of the kids at my school belonged to (who roundly teased me for sounding posh).

For me, the clearest distinction between working and middle class is the attitude towards conversation. WC people typically value directness and honesty, whereas MC value politeness and avoiding discomfort. (These tendencies, of course, and context-dependent.) I'm aware that MC politeness is often read as two-faced pr deceptive by WC, and likewise WC directness could be interpreted as rudeness by MC people.

The kind of community people engage with differs by class too. Entry to an MC household tends to be invite-only, even for good friends, whereas WC often have open households where an outer circle of known people come and go quite freely.

Messy aspects of life can be more visible in WC communities, but MC do their best to hide the mess of life, seeing it as a source of shame.

I realise that these are generalisations. Class is kind of a fuzzy model of society.

One particularly jarring one my son has picked up from school is the use of [yə] as a stressed object pronoun, which is just not possible for me.

I must have heard this around, but I cannot conceptualise it.

Then there are incorrect verb forms like "was" as a general past in all persons.

I don't have this, but I do find myself responding to new information with "Is it?" even when that doesn't match the statement, e.g.
"Janet got her hall repainted finally"
"Oh, is it?"

[chris_notts]

I would say I hear [eɪ ʊp mɪ dʊk] more frequently than [eɪ ʌp mɪ dʌk]. Despite having the foot-strut split in my normal accent, I always use the foot vowel in "Ay up". I picked up more of my mum's SSBE accent than the local East Mids accent. For me those are clues that I fall into the middle class, rather than the working class that most of the kids at my school belonged to (who roundly teased me for sounding posh).

My transcription may be off as I don't have that split, or at best marginally do. I did originally write ʊ but then questioned myself and replaced it...

The kind of community people engage with differs by class too. Entry to an MC household tends to be invite-only, even for good friends, whereas WC often have open households where an outer circle of known people come and go quite freely.

It would normally never even occur to me to show up at someone's house uninvited, and even calling to try to invite myself is quite hard - normally hinting quite hard is the way to go.

One particularly jarring one my son has picked up from school is the use of [yə] as a stressed object pronoun, which is just not possible for me.

I must have heard this around, but I cannot conceptualise it.

[jə] might be slightly wrong, but the vowel is clearly quite centralised. I think most people have alternating "you" as an object pronoun based on stress: [ju] when stressed, and something like [jʊ] ~ [jə] when unstressed, especially in the middle of speech. Try saying:

I saw you in the train station
I saw you in the train station

And see if the vowel changes. What my son is copying is the neutralisation of these two forms in favour of the one with the centralised vowel, so the only difference is stress and not vowel quality.

[chris_notts]

Also I meant [jə] not [yə]...

[Linguoboy]

For me, the clearest distinction between working and middle class is the attitude towards conversation. WC people typically value directness and honesty, whereas MC value politeness and avoiding discomfort. (These tendencies, of course, and context-dependent.) I'm aware that MC politeness is often read as two-faced pr deceptive by WC, and likewise WC directness could be interpreted as rudeness by MC people.

I recently came across an old Metafilter post which contrasted these two approaches as "Ask culture" and "Guess culture", though I haven't yet seen any attempt to correlate them with class. Obviously, it's not a simple correlation because there are parts of the USA (e.g. the Midwest and the South) where Guess culture seems pretty common across all classes and the most extreme example of it I've ever seen comes from an anthropological study of Malagasy village life. (The lengths Malagasy peasants will go to to avoid a direct refusal are summed up by an incident where someone visits the author desperate to get him to come to his village, and the closest he can get to actually asking him is standing at the trailhead and yelling to him, "This is the road to my village!")

For me, though, Guess culture is something I learned from my bourgeois mother, who was steeped in it. She can ask me the most innocuous question and I'll hold off answering it until I've figured out what the question behind it is (which may first require a side consultation with one of my siblings). I recall Sal describing something like this when dealing with his mother. I don't think I realised how odd it was until I came to university and met more people from Ask cultures. Now I try to push back a bit, because it's frankly exhausting.

I still find it difficult to make direct requests of anyone who's not in a service position (and even there I'll try to soften my requests with polite language). The thought of inviting myself over to someone else's house just makes me cringe. Even when it comes to getting a lift from someone who I know lives close me, the most I'll allow myself to do is hint.

[mèþru]

Welcome back! Would you mind elaborating on those changes?

Ha! A very ZBB question! I miss this place.
political views it'd take forever and most of it is about news that has already become irrelevant, like opinon on Bloomberg
my self-identity - I used to say my rejection of gender is purely philosophical/political, but I have gotten feelings. I identify as trans and non-binary now.
how I say things - being on a Discord server with lots of trans furry anarchists has changed my vocabulary and way of saying things - I like to think I'm more compassionate. Definitely I started saying the word valid a lot. And meeting a bunch of plural people has changed the way I talk and think about about plurality.
no longer single - I have a girlfriend and serveral metamours

[quinterbeck]

I recently came across an old Metafilter post which contrasted these two approaches as "Ask culture" and "Guess culture", though I haven't yet seen any attempt to correlate them with class.

That's really interesting, and I do think it doesn't quite line up with class (as it exists here in England). My family is pretty middle class but we're definitely more Ask culture than Guess culture. The tendency I was trying to describe is a bit broader.

The thought of inviting myself over to someone else's house just makes me cringe.

Yeah, me too (although with certain friends I'm comfortable asking if I can come over). I think the framing of 'inviting oneself over' is a very middle class way of thinking about it. In a close-knit working class community, households are more permeable, and there's a set of homes in your community that you are welcome in at any time by virtue of your friendship with those homes' occupants. It's founded on the common understanding in that community that things just work like that.

In a middle class community it's natural to feel uncomfortable with the idea of inviting yourself over because the common expectation is different. An invitation is the acceptable way to access another's home.

Even my parents constantly tell me I can come round whenever except for now because of quarantine and I can't bring myself to do it without at least letting them know I plan to come over beforehand!

[Kuchigakatai]

my self-identity - I used to say my rejection of gender is purely philosophical/political, but I have gotten feelings. I identify as trans and non-binary now.
how I say things - being on a Discord server with lots of trans furry anarchists has changed my vocabulary and way of saying things - I like to think I'm more compassionate. Definitely I started saying the word valid a lot. And meeting a bunch of plural people has changed the way I talk and think about about plurality.
no longer single - I have a girlfriend and serveral metamours

And here, every year that passes I seem to understand strong feelings towards identity less and less. I didn't choose to be born in Latin America, why should I feel emotional about that? It's an accident of birth. Sure, it shaped a lot of what I am, but so did contact or hearing about people who are or were different and think or thought differently. A good chunk of the reasons (or blame, if you prefer) for my abandonment of the Catholicism I grew up with was media from Japan and the US, my failure to find a church here in Canada that was as liberal as what I was used to in El Salvador, contact with plenty of different people on forums and classrooms, and reading things like certain American proto-hippie works from the 1940s...

At the same time though, I've been recently reading things suggesting that political opinion is to some extent, a good extent, a matter of fashion, shifting across the social classes as time passes, and appealing more or less strongly to people depending on their personality. Nortaneous recently worded it well recently when he said that in the 2000s American liberals were (at large) the "shock jocks" and conservatives were the "pearl clutchers", and that by the late 2010s they had switched roles. Consider that a "normal" shock image in mid-2000s Anglo Internet was an amateur photo of three naked, very elderly men having sex on a bed, no women in sight, or a video of two naked women slowly kissing while smearing chocolate off a cup on each other pretending it was excrement (there was supposedly an interview where they or the filmer clarified this), or a picture of a (supposedly?) dead woman on a bed with a big wooden cross inserted down her throat. These were attacks against the moralizing Christian right wing of the time. In late 2010s Anglo Internet, it'd be a picture of a white woman with long, undyed hair wearing a dress in front of a corn field, or a picture of a slyly-smiling cartoon frog in Franciscan monk robes "saving" a crying man with his right-wing ideas. How did this cultural changes even happen, how?

I think that the ideas that 1) my bafflement at current North American identity politics is a result of a somewhat contrarian personality, and that 2) if I lived in an environment where most identities were commonly derided I'd be the identity politics guy even if not openly and overtly, are quite likely true, and I can't quite put into words just how much this disturbs me... It's as if I'm a powerless empty boat on a sea, moved in different directions according to how the tides move following much larger aggregated forces. And I wouldn't say I'm all the more compassionate for it in recent years, but more tolerant. (I don't think I can feel compassion for people I hate, but do I have to? Would you, methru, feel compassion for a {non-binary}-bashing but destitute, rural young fundamental Christian?) It also definitely reminds me of the idea that no matter how hard you try, you can't truly stamp out different ways of thinking, you can only repress them and the people who hold them. I like the metaphor the ancient Greeks used: Dionysus is a rowdy, indecency-loving god but you can't truly get rid of him; if you try, he runs out of the city to the mountains, attracts followers, and comes back with desire for vengeance... until he is able to join the other gods of the people again.

[mèþru]

Are you suggesting that being trans is a choice? That I'm being political for existing?

[dɮ the phoneme]

Would you, methru, feel compassion for a {non-binary}-bashing but destitute, rural young fundamental Christian?

I am not methru, but I would like to chime in here as another non-binary(-ish/androgynous idk) person. I absolutely would feel compassion for a {non-binary}-bashing but destitute fundamentalist Christian. My single greatest discontent with the contemporary (online, Anglophone) left is the absurd purity politics. The attitude that the wrong kind of people don't deserve compassion. I'm strongly wedded to the notion that everyone deserves compassion by default. I generally am not fond of the idea that people come to "deserve" particular outcomes, whether positive or negative, via their actions. Rather, I prefer a universalizing ethic in which compassion is extended as broadly as possible.

Now, the type of 'compassion' that I'm talking about, I admit, can be a bit abstracted. I understand that on an individual, emotional level, people aren't necessarily capable of simply giving compassion freely to those who would harm them, or who they imagine would harm them. I'm certainly not always capable of it. Most people aren't wired like that, and a politics which requires people to be wired in way that they aren't is doomed to failure. But, I try to compensate for that structurally. If I support the creation and maintenance of structures which institutionalize compassionate actions, then there is less of a need for everybody to personally "feel" compensate all the time. Maybe this is stretching the meaning of compassion beyond its natural bounds, but I think it's a fair usage of the term. After all, the point of compassion isn't just how it feels, but what good it compels one to do.

[Kuchigakatai]

Are you suggesting that being trans is a choice? That I'm being political for existing?

Where do you even infer that from? I am, in fact, biased towards believing there is a strong biological component somewhere in being trans. Please pardon the snark, but you do know there are other possible political views than the Anglo Internet rightism you probably attack and get attacked by? Am I such an alien for my centrism?

What I'm saying is that identity politics, as in, intense systems and activism based on what one is born with and has no control over, increasingly baffles me in recent years. I'd find a balance of choices and non-choices better, and I also find myself actually caring more about what people choose to be and choose to do. (Although I also expressed some concerns about me possibly heading this way out of a contrarian type of fashion. In a similar line of thought, I am very skeptical of the assumption that a whole world can be converted to a view, which much of politics seems to operate under...) Also, people change across time. It doesn't seem to me like people can change their personality much at all, but they can change their beliefs and habits on tons of things, to the point it adds to my questioning of the whole emphasis on born-with identities.

[Kuchigakatai]

Also, I try to rarely say anything political, and I think at this moment I'm kind of reacting out of some grudge over things you've said and done in the past, and I know I shouldn't do so. I'd like to apologize for the excessive politics, although I do stand by my concerns over politicking on born-with identities, and not believing centrist views outside of the Left and Right are real. I dislike that I keep coming across people who often stereotype others' politics and assume lots of what they believe, and maybe I am stereotyping you as one of such people.

Pointless politicking, as ever... Ser, when will you learn...?

EDIT: And maybe I'm just too irritable today. Should go take a chill moment and not talk to anyone.

[Travis B.]

A good example of non-rightist positions that are critical of a highly identity-political-type position are traditional leftist positions, which focus on the class struggle over all other things (e.g. "no war but the class war") and favor solidarity between races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, gender orientations, and so on over conflict between them. When I became an anarchist years ago this is what I believed in, and so it bothers me that now the focus is on dividing up the population based on identity and based on just how oppressed one person is vis-a-vis another.

[Raphael]

Class is an identity. And thinking that the only social divisions that matter are class distinctions is simply too reductionist to reflect reality.

That said, I don't really like "oppression olympics", either, and I don't like reducing people to any group they belong to, be it class or anything else.

[Linguoboy]

Are you suggesting that being trans is a choice? That I'm being political for existing?

I can't speak directly to the trans experience but the way I've always approached my LGBTQ+ identity is that I was born with a certain set of attractions. Choosing to conceptualise these as "homosexual" in nature and asserting a "gay" or "queer" identity on the basis of them is clearly a matter of choice, since I've personally witnessed others make different choices. Add in the fact that there's been a lasting and significant movement to deny me fundamental human rights on the basis of this identity makes this choice a political one, as much as I might like it to be just another incidental facet of my personality. My defence of identity politics has always been that it has allowed me to secure many of these fundamental rights in the face of organised opposition. (With respect to this, my experience with Marxism and other movements based on the notion of class struggle is that they've been all mouth and no trousers, whatever broader benefits they may have brought to those forced to sell their labour.)

If I'd been born with the same set of attractions in a different place and/or time, I would have developed a different identity. Heck, the attractions themselves would have been shaped differently. I think about this often, about what my sexual and romantic expression would have been had I been born in Victorian England or Koryŏ Dynasty Korea or what have you. So I guess I can kind of see where Ser is coming from when he frets about his political opinions being "a matter of fashion". Certainly, if I'd even been born in the same place ten years later, my identity and therefore my politics would not have developed in the same way. I'm not really sure what to do about that besides acknowledge the limits of my own experience as I strive for universality.

[Raphael]

In my case, I'm a straight guy who's not particularly "masculine" in the traditional sense, and who doesn't really fit into the traditional masculine gender role. My impression is that some of today's theorists of gender would say that this means that I'm not really male, or not completely male, or something else in addition to being male.

But the thing is, precisely because I don't accept traditional gender roles, I'm not interested in sorting myself into any group based on whether I do or don't fit into a specific traditional gender role. Frankly, I've got the impression that some of today's theorists of gender basically agree with traditionalist cultural conservatives that if the gender you have, so far, identified as, and the gender role you fit into, don't align, there's something wrong with you - they just disagree on which one of these two things you should change in that case.

Or, to put it a bit differently - traditionalist cultural conservatives believe that gender should determine personality; some of today's theorists of gender seem to believe that personality should determine gender; I believe that there shouldn't be any connection between personality and gender.

[chris_notts]

A good example of non-rightist positions that are critical of a highly identity-political-type position are traditional leftist positions, which focus on the class struggle over all other things (e.g. "no war but the class war") and favor solidarity between races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, gender orientations, and so on over conflict between them. When I became an anarchist years ago this is what I believed in, and so it bothers me that now the focus is on dividing up the population based on identity and based on just how oppressed one person is vis-a-vis another.

Politicians who try to "buy" their election by identity-based segmention are very frustrating. Some give the impression of having built a long list of groups that add up to a winning percentage of the vote and then working down it saying "we give this to the white working class women, that to the LGBT voters, ...". This isn't how you should run a country. It's not about values or overall goals, it's just pork barrel politics and buying votes with no idea what you actually want to accomplish once you're in power. Policies should flow from overarching goals and values and the real problems of society, not from electorate salami slicing. And the worst of it is that such politians usually do this to frustrate any attempt to actually improve the lot of the majority.

For example, on the left we have people who want to tackle the big problems of society, of inequality, healthcare etc, then we have the people saying "you can't have any of the big things, but whatever identity erasing conformist box you fall into, we have a trivial token policy for you!". There's no real vision there except for tweaking the status quo as little as possible and keeping their own snouts in the trough.

[Raphael]

Politicians who try to "buy" their election by identity-based segmention are very frustrating. Some give the impression of having built a long list of groups that add up to a winning percentage of the vote and then working down it saying "we give this to the white working class women, that to the LGBT voters, ...". This isn't how you should run a country. It's not about values or overall goals, it's just pork barrel politics and buying votes with no idea what you actually want to accomplish once you're in power.

Yeah, that must be it. It is, of course, absolutely impossible that offering different things to people from different oppressed groups might be the result of a general attitude of thinking "I want to oppose and reduce oppression, and therefore I will offer various improvements to members of various oppressed groups, depending on what specific forms of oppression they're facing". No, it must be crude attempts at vote-buying with no unifying theme.

Quite interesting, though, how you think that, when politicians promise to meet demands by members of groups you don't belong to, they're trying to buy votes, while, when politicians promise to meet your demands, they're acting from the purest of principles.

[chris_notts]

Yeah, that must be it. It is, of course, absolutely impossible that offering different things to people from different oppressed groups might be the result of a general attitude of thinking "I want to oppose and reduce oppression, and therefore I will offer various improvements to members of various oppressed groups, depending on what specific forms of oppression they're facing". No, it must be crude attempts at vote-buying with no unifying theme.

Did I ever actually say that? Why do you insist on reinterpreting everything that any non-centrist on here says in the most extreme way possible? I don't think I've ever had you respond to me on a political topic in a way that didn't amount to a personal attack. Apparently I don't just disagree with you about why some politicians do what they do, I'm fundamentally blinkered and incapable of empathy with those I disagree with.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to have a principled reason for any of these policies, only that there are a lot of politicians who do not seem to have any unifying set of values behind what's in vs what's out beyond pure political calculations. Another example that springs to mind: why did David Cameron reverse a long-standing resistance to gay marriage on the part of the Conservative party? Did the party that happily deported black UK citizens and wants to withdraw from the ECHR suddenly discover a deep love for equality? Or was it just political game playing to look a bit more progressive without any actual change in values?

Quite interesting, though, how you think that, when politicians promise to meet demands by members of groups you don't belong to, they're trying to buy votes, while, when politicians promise to meet your demands, they're acting from the purest of principles.

As I said, almost any policy can potentially be values based, but the fact it can doesn't mean that's why someone is advocating it. Voter triangulation is a thing.

[zompist]

In my case, I'm a straight guy who's not particularly "masculine" in the traditional sense, and who doesn't really fit into the traditional masculine gender role. My impression is that some of today's theorists of gender would say that this means that I'm not really male, or not completely male, or something else in addition to being male.

Though I can't say I read a lot of gender theory, I don't think anyone maintains anything like this. Personal identity is paramount these days, so if you consider yourself masculine, I don't think people can say you're "really" not.

(I do suspect there's a tension between the ideas behind trans and nonbinary identity. E.g. X is a trans dude and believes being male is essential to his identity; Y is nonbinary and thinks "male identity" is a noxious cultural construct. But there's no real conflict unless X and Y try to force each other to believe or act in a particular way, and that's precisely what's prevented by making personal self-definition primary.)

[Raphael]

I'm not saying that it's impossible to have a principled reason for any of these policies, only that there are a lot of politicians who do not seem to have any unifying set of values behind what's in vs what's out beyond pure political calculations. Another example that springs to mind: why did David Cameron reverse a long-standing resistance to gay marriage on the part of the Conservative party? Did the party that happily deported black UK citizens and wants to withdraw from the ECHR suddenly discover a deep love for equality? Or was it just political game playing to look a bit more progressive without any actual change in values?

Fair enough.