My Virtual Reading Room

MS. FOUND UNDER A SERVIETTE IN A LOVELY HOME

Our outlook is totally different from that of our American cousins, who have never had an aristocracy.  Americans relate all effort, all work, and all of life itself to the dollar.  Their talk is of nothing but dollars.  The English seldom sit happily chatting for hours on end about pounds.

(Nancy Mittford in Noblesse Oblige)

Dear Cousin Nancy:

You probably never heard of me or Cousin Beauregard or Cousin Yancey,
But since you're claiming kin all the way across the ocean, we figure you must be at least partwise Southern,
So we consider you not only our kith and kin but also our kithin' couthern.

I want to tell you, when cousin Emmy Lou showed us your piece it stopped the conversation flat,
Because I had twenty dollars I wanted to talk about, and Cousin Beauregard had ten dollars he wanted to talk about, and Cousin Yancey didn't have any dollars at all, and he wanted to talk about that.
But Cousin Emmy Lou looked over her spectacles, which the common people call glasses,
And she offered us a dollar to stop talking about dollars and start talking about the English upper classes.

Cousin Beauregard wanted to know why the English aristocracy was called English when most of their names were French to begin with,
And now anybody with an English name like Hobbs or Stobbs has to accumulate several million of those pounds they seldom chat about, to buy his way in with.
Cousin Yancey said he could understand that--the St. Aubyns beat the hell out of Hobbses in 1066--but there was a more important point that he could not determine,
Which is why the really aristocratic English aristocrats have names that are translated from the German.

Cousin Emmy Lou is pretty aristocratic herself; in spite of her weakness for hog jowl and potlikker, she is noted for her highborn pale and wan flesh,
And where most people get gooseflesh she gets swan flesh,
And she said she thought you ought to know that she had been over the royal roster
And she had spotted at least one impostor.

She noticed that the Wicked Queen said "Mirror, mirror on the wall" instead of  "Looking glass, looking glass on the wall," which is perfectly true,
So the Wicked Queen exposed herself as not only wicked but definitely non-U,
After that, we loosened our collars
And resumed our conversation about dollars.

(Ogden Nash)