MaizieD
Houses lit up worse than Blackpool illuminations at Christmas. Blow up Santas.
Just wondering where the words 'settee' and 'serviette' came from and why Nancy Mitford should have regarded them with such horror that it persists for decades...
"Settee" was in daily use amongst my grandmother's generation in Scotland, "sofa" being considered by them to be lah-di-dah, and couch, vulgar" Did an expression such as "set thee there" for "sit down" morph into the piece of furniture you sat on? Anyone know? Yes, Chambers' Dictionary, but it is upstairs and I down, and I am too lazy to go and fetch said dictionary
Serviette is something that serves a purpose, I imagine the word does exist in French, although it may at one time have meant a cloth you wiped your bottom with rather than your mouth!
My mother used it in preference to napkin, as to her a napkin was the formal term for the homely article called a nappy in my childhood, whereas my great aunt happily distinguished between table napkins and babies' napkins and never spoke of a nappy for the last-name kind of napkin.
I doubt Nancy Mitford was solely responsible for the dislike of words like serviette - I think all Edwardians who considered themselves upper middle class scorned them.
And of course, well-educated Edwardians did tend to scorn Scottish, Yorkshire or , Tyneside or Scouse expressions, didn't they, and the farther away you got from London, the more common, in the sense of usual, these words became.
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