Dear Log,
«Nancy Mitford's guide to "U" and "non-U" seems ridiculous today. Nobody cares if you say "notepaper" instead of "writing paper", or "mirror" instead of "looking glass", or "toilet" instead of "lavatory", or if you pronounce the opera house "Covent Garden", with a hard "o", instead of "Cuvent Garden", with a soft one, or "controversy" instead of "controversy". There's no longer any accepted standard for such matters, not even at the BBC, which makes us much more easygoing, culturally, than the French.»
-- "The [English] Class Menagerie"
I'm oddly curious whether any English people have read Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Class System. It's a fun fun fun book!
and there is a distinction between old money and the nouveau riche' in the states but it's more subtle than how much money they have. Though the US doesn't have U and non-U terms, how well a person writes or the extent of their vocabulary is a bit of a calling card for class. Conspicuous consumption also tends to indicate new money. Even classes have subclasses
