How do you define being a Snob!

Or badly educated!

Oh my God, I've done a greengrocer's comma. Now everybody will think I'm common

When I was a child my mother once told me that I wouldn't pass for Grammar School because only 'snob's did that. She was right, I didn't.

Anagram I did say 'most'.

Anyway, you say you had an excellent education so I was half right.

is there is such a thing as inverted snobbery?I have seen it in several of my ex work colleagues,maybe I am wrong, but isnt that true snobbery? not wanting anything to do with people who they see as a different class and "hoity toity nobs" in other words middle and upperclass,without getting to know them as people

that must mean i'm elderly...

I object to being addressed by my first name by people who call out of the blue or who don't know me - I use a diminutive of it anyway. I was brought up to call my elders 'Mrs ...' though I do now call my mum's friends by their first names though it felt strange for ages! Otherwise good family friends were always 'Auntie' and 'Uncle'.

When I was working as a physio, we wouldn't have dreamt of addressing a patient by their first name, probably would've been told off for doing so. Maybe this is why there are so many problems in the care system as staff are too familiar with the elderly who really don't like people being too familiar without invitation!

I must take issue with your assumption, petallus, that most of the posters on GN are current or former professionals.

I had a excellent education, but chose not to enter 'the professions', and I'm sure I'm not alone. I would have thought the last thing GN needs is to be accused of elitism.

I think the title of this thread is probably aimed at me. I should stress that I don't look down on people who read the DM - I look down on the people who publish it.

A very good point Greatnan

I do wonder if there are many members who just read posts and don't feel ready to post replies. It may be that posters are a self-selected group composed mainly of professionals who tend to be more confident in putting their thoughts into 'print'.

I think we pick up this information as we go along in all the threads.

We did have one thread about what we had done in the past, but we have no way of knowing if the replies were a true cross-section.

We may well be different in lots of ways but I think what we have in common, for the majority of us anyway, is having had a reasonable education and being in the professions.

bagitha

Didn't Princess Diana have an expensive private education and achieve one GCSE? The children of both parents with inherited wealth, or those from self-made parents, can exhibit the same degree of stupidity. I don't know if is genetic or if lacking motivation to succeed in their own right leads to idiots like Brian Ferry's son behaving badly. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson is not a great advert for wealth and privilege either.
Centuries of inbreeding have not tended to produce the best brains amongst the aristocracy.

As for gransnetters being posh - as far as I can see the only thing we have in common apart from the majority of us being grandparents is our ownership or access to a computer and the ability to use it.

Keep hitting the m or n instead of the space bar.

It's possible to become well-educated even when you come from a deprived background, as the rise of the middle class shows. Well-educated does not equal posh, nor does posh equal well-educated.I don't think it would help tomconfuse the two.

Greatnan I'm putting up a challenge to your claim to have had as underprivileged a childhood as anyone here on the basis that your parents encouraged you to read widely and listen to classical music.

As for attitudes towards people who don't manage to retain much general knowledge, can't spell or speak properly, well one of the reasons I gave up the Guardian and struggle sometimes with Private Eye is the sniggering in both those publications by well-educated/public school types at others who have had poor/little education and who come from backgrounds where anything cultural is alien or actively discouraged.

Let's admit it, on the whole Gransnetters are a posh bunch

One of the many pleasures of my visits to NZ is my daughter's tiramisu - in general I don't like sweet things, but the combination of alcohol, cream and coffee is irresistible. I might even have a go at making it myself now you have put it into my head!
Bags, I do agree about quiz knowledge. The Eggheads now treat the quiz as a job and spend many hours just learning lists. Memory is an odd, quirky, thing. I can remember reams of academic stuff from school/college days, but my sister can tell me conversations we had 40 years ago which I have entirely forgotten. (Mostly, the ones that show her in a good light!)

I found some of my teaching colleagues incredibly unsympathetic and hostile to my 'remedial' pupils,some or whom were coping with home lives that would reduce many of us to gibbering wrecks. I found one of 'my' boys selling shoes on his uncle's stall at the local market. He offered to give me a discount of 5% and he was able to quote the reduced pricesinstantly. He was convinced he was useless at maths. They could also do instant subtraction when playing darts and some could work out the odds on a treble accumulator on the dogs. They used as much as they needed of anything they learned in school. The ethos of the school, whose head had only ever worked in a highly selective Christian Brothers grammar school before, was alien to them. My biggest problem was making them see how they could use what I could teach them in their own lives. At least I managed to get a good course on health, relationships and parenting past the Chairman of the governors, Father English! (Including methods of contraception). I wish some of my patronising colleagues could have listened to the wisdom and insights that they showed in discussions on these subjects which really mattered to them.

jeni There was no tiramisu anywhere in the late 1960s. It's not a traditional Italian dessert; it was invented in the 1980s.

Probably, greatnan ! I think there's a huge difference between knowledge of events that would help you win quizzes and more ethereal knowledge which is about ideas rather than facts, though facts can be useful in that field as well. I happen to think there is something called quiz knowledge. I think you probably have both kinds, which doesn't make you a snob, except when we want to tease you .

Well, if dressing smartly and being well made-up and with a good hair-do make you a snob, I am certainly off the hook!
I think we could have a competition along the lines of 'There were ten of us in a shoebox and we thought we was lucky'. I claim to have had as underprivileged a childhood as anyone here. Does that exonerate me from the charge of snobbishness? No, on second thoughts there are lots of people who climb up the ladder and then kick it away behind them - Margaret Thatcher? My background did make me particularly sympathetic towards the children I taught, who mainly had the same kind of home (although my parents did encourage us to read widely and listen to classical music).
I have to admit to wincing when someone exhibits amazing ignorance of things I had believed everybody would know. On the National Lottery quiz tonight, one man was asked who was assassinated on the Ides of March. He chose Franz Ferdinand. Another woman thought 'Land of My Fathers' was the Scottish national anthem. A couple on Pointless decided that Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister in 1840 - another couple thought that Neil Kinnock was a past president of the Irish Republic. Does that make me an intellectual snob?

Snobs come in a variety of types IMO.

Having just moved out of the city suburbs to a small town my city based friends are being 'snobby' because they think I have somehow 'sold out'. They regularly make disparaging remarks about me being a 'country bumpkin' and obviously think city life is 100 times better than small town because it is less cosmopolitan and takes me 20 mins longer to get to city centre!

It was just one of those friendly neighbourhood shops where calling anyone 'madam' seemed unfriendly and distancing.
I have worked in red light areas and some very rough places e.g with over 30 methadone addicts and many colourful characters
Yes nelliedeane I do agree that sometimes the gender of customers can be uncertain.I always tried to be smartly dressed at work unlike some Sat girls who it seems had never owned a comb or an iron.Oh dear now I'm being snobby!

back to names I had most difficulty with Chinese names -knowing which way round it should be -which was 'family' name?