What is posh?

Moocow. They are lovely people. I think the genuinely posh ones usually are.
They dont need to score points for one thing. Everyone knows they are the real deal so to speak.

For proper posh people it has become a matter of holding onto their wealth.
Ironically, it is now not so much the land that can keep the wealth intact nowadays, but a matter of the farm cottages, barns etc, that can be the most lucrative part.
Or, if parts of your land happen to be in just the right place for a major new development of some sort. Their's has, twice!

They do put others at their ease but no-one can quite forget.

The worst thing for me is when she comes to my house, gulp! I have to quickly forget to compare her house to mine! And her cooking abilities!

Jalima - sadly for them, they have almost run out of furniture that is handed down.

Jalima, yes you must be posh!

Jalima - sadly for them, they have almost run out of furniture that is handed down.

She is posh on both sides of her family, but on her dad's side, as he says sometimes, there were too many children born, so the wealth had to be divided up between more families.

I dont think I will post any more about them, I have probably posted enough already.

Michael Heseltine once said that if you had to buy your own furniture you were only middle class.

I will google later pat but I thought it was said about Micheal Heseltine by Alan Clark. I could be wrong and often am. ☺

I alternated between being posh and being'normal'. We grew up in Hong Kong, very cosmopolitan place , so didn't have an accent - there were so many to choose from. When we returned to the uk we did sound posh compared to our Lancastrian friends and family. We got a lot of teasing some of it not very nice, by the time we went back my sisters and I had learnt to speak Lancashire.
One of my posh(very) clients buys most of her clothes from charity shops, has holes in her vests and went to a very posh skiing holiday in ski pants from M&Co. she said her fellow guests would just assume they were designer!

Really posh people don't even have to buy their own house .

You are not wrong Ann!

Pensionpat It was Alan Clark who said that about Heseltine. But this has now been discounted as a myth.

It may have been an "on dit" but it was a good one, saying more about the originator than his subject

"Another piece of Heseltine folklore is a fabulously snobby comment recorded by the late political diarist Alan Clark: "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy his own furniture." "

Heseltine is now said to be worth £250 million.

I wonder why Victoria Beckham was called Posh Spice?

Tricia, I think it was because her parents owned their own semidetached house and the other Spice Girls came from council houses.

Thanks Niobe.
The word must go back some time - I associate it with a character in The Diary of a Nobody - Murray Posh of 'Posh's Three Shilling Hats.' Written in the 1880s.

en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-posh
So sadly the P.O.S.H theory may not be true, shame it was a convenient one!
In Victorian times a"posh" was another word for a dandy or a "swell".
That would make sense.

I think posh is relative. My current workmates think I'm posh because I went to university and have a larger vocabulary than they do but I remeber befriending a lady at a mother and toddler who was terribly self effacing and shy.
One of the first things she asked me was did we have an upstairs or a downstairs playroom and what was my opinion on the relative merits of each.
I was struck dumb with astonishment because, for me and most of my friends, the idea of a room soley for the children to play in and not having to clear toys away in the family sitting room each evening was a luxury beyond imagining!
Turned out her father had been Lloyds, "name" who had lost most of the family money and she, in consequence, was now having to live in, "drastically reduced circumstances" in a house roughly three times the size of mine!
She was lovely though, just desperately wanting to, "fit in" with the local mums and make a life for herself and her DD. When I laughed and told her that I didn't have a playroom at all and neither, to my knowledge, did most of the other mums at the group she flushed beetroot red and apologised profusely, hoping I didn't think she was trying to be, "grand". She was just trying to be coversational and break the ice as it were!
I liked her but, unfortunately, most of the others shunned her as being, "not like us" and the poor thing eventually had a breakdown and moved away from the area. A sad example of inverse snobbery.

I wonder why Victoria Beckham was called Posh Spice?
I think she came from a well-off family, dad had his own business (electronic engineering).
Beckham (Posh Spice) attended St. Mary's High School in Cheshunt, where she was embarrassed by her family's wealth and often begged her father not to drop her off outside the school in their Rolls Royce

I knew someone who used to do Michael Heseltine's mother's hair.
Mrs H Senior was very nice apparently; his father had done well and owned a factory but both sides had come from very humble beginnings.
Michael always looks 'posh' though, doesn't he

We had a downstairs playroom when the DC were small.

It was aka as 'dining room' when we had visitors but first we had to have a good tidy up.

I must be posh as we've had a playroom since the children were little. In our old house it was made by converting all the out buildings Eg coalhouse, outside loo and garden store. In this house we still have a room called the playroom.

I had a school friend who came from a very wealthy family. They had a grand piano in their enormous drawing room. They had a number of servants. The maids wore uniform black dresses and white pinnies.

Next to the drawing room was the morning room where the lady of the house could take morning coffee while the servants cleaned the drawing room. I thought at the time (1950s) that they were posh but now I'm not sure. Did they just have a lot of money?

My mum used to call us kid's bedroom (in a terraced house) "The Nursery"

I think if they called the sitting room and the snug the drawing room and the morning room they were posh

Mam insisted that I learned to speak GPO English and not 'ull. Fine at home but enough to get me called posh at school so I spoke 'ull at school and GPO at home.

VQ same here , except it was Geordie and GPO english.
I think it was all about social classes - my Mum came from a middle class, rather snobbish family. I suppose they were 'posh'. Dad's family was more working class, more down to earth. Definitely not posh.

When I was about six, my uncle (by marriage) took me to visit his brothers house I was impressed when told that the stand with flowers in on the landing was a 'jardiniere'.... Is that posh, I wonder?