Mind your language
I WAS thinking of the poor Queen aboard Britannia, bound for Scotland for the last time, with a box of summer reading chosen by her advisers — lain Banks and such horrors probably when my husband sat up in his deckchair and said, 'Note-paper.'
He was reading The Claverings, and had come across it on page 87 (in the World's Classics edition, it's in Chapter IX): 'The engaged young ladies only whisper the news through the very depths of their pink note-paper.'
`Yes, dear,' I replied. `Nancy Mitford would have had something to say to Mr Trollope.'
Nancy Mitford had noted the distinc- tion of non-U note-paper and U writing- paper (parallel to non-U toilet-paper vs U lavatory-paper) in The Pursuit of Love, published in 1945, 78 years after The Claverings. The Pursuit of Love predated the collection of essays finally collected in the book Noblesse Oblige (1956) in which Alan S.C. Ross developed the whole concept of U and non-U usage. Forty years on, and U and non-U seem to be enjoying a revival, despite there being far fewer U people in evi- dence. Some of the Mitford-Ross dis- tinctions are based on non-U things, and Trollope's sentence illustrates this: pink note-paper (or Lady Falkender's laven- der note-paper) is a vulgar thing to use — like doilies or (some say) fish-knives. But note-paper is a thing distinct from the generality of writing-paper, When hundreds of volunteers were invited in the 19th century to collect quotations to put in the Oxford English Dictionary, they were instructed to write them on slips the size of half-sheets of note-paper, and everyone knew what was meant.
Mrs Carlyle used the word in 1849. She, naturally, was referring to 'black- bordered note-paper', which must surely be much less non-U than pink note- paper. Worse, in 1824 Charles Lamb was talking about notelets: 'I cannot fill a letter ... you shall have a notelet.' Notelets these days generally have pictures of squirrels and other furry ani- male on them (like those pictorial cheques). That really is non-U.
Dot Wordsworth
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