Take a seat

Sofa or settee? When I was growing up there was a definite snobbery attached to which word you used. Journalist and novelist Nancy Mitford once attempted to set the record straight with her 1950s essay: ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, meaning ‘U’ for upper class and ‘Non-U’ for the middle classes. This highlighted the insecurities of the aspiring middle-classes who apparently over-stressed the ‘poshness’ of things by using more complicated words than the upper-classes. According to Mitford, it is a sofa, whereas I grew up calling it a settee – I was obviously aspiring to be middle class…