What is posh?

I thought my aunty and uncle were posh because they had a soda syphon lol

I met a lady once who told me that she'd never learnt to drive as it hadn't crossed her mind that a time would come when she didn't have a chauffeur!

My parents' (particularly my father's) aim in life was to climb the social ladder and adopt many posh things. We had a jardinière! We also had a loggia, a sunlounge and a croquet lawn!

They never gave up their working class tea, though - thick, well brewed and with milk. Couldn't get on with Chinese or the finer Indian teas.

jackie

I was told never to use the word posh as it indicated you had an inferiority complex or were envious. I don't like the word and think it is very dated. Although I suppose "upmarket" is a new word of classification.
The Duchess of Cambridge's Mother, Carole,sat in a Silver Cross pram outside her Mother's council house. Her Mother was considered posh by the neighbours but it was the start of big things to come! Look to the stars; never down to the gutter.

How I loved my Silver Cross prams, I was so proud pushing my daughters out in them.
That's another thing the people with old money do, pass down the old prams. No fancy modern buggies for them.

If only my maternal GGF hadn't been the second son of a second son of a prosperous landed family! I do have one piece of ancestral furniture which my senior DGD fancies, so I hope it will go on down the generations.

If only my ancestor way back about 1600 had been born to his uncle, not his father! As it was, he did inherit quite a lot, but made a will leaving a house to each of them, and distributed his money around them all, and then they in turn had large families too and spent it all.

We wiz robbed, anno!

For "them" read "his many sons and daughters"

Elegran, family rumour has it that my GGF spent his share on the horses.

I remember asking my Dad if any of our family had been famous.
He said your GGGGGGF+ was hung drawn and quartered

We had one very prominent international cricketer in the family round about 1900, who stood for Parliament in the nineteen twenties. My father and uncles and aunts were roped in to stuff letterboxes with campaigning material because he was "family" - but I have since discovered that his branch diverged from ours way back when the money diverged too, about 500 years ago. Memories of family branches and twigs persist for a long time!

All my furniture is second-hand, so I suppose that makes me very posh indeed!
My late aunt had been head parlour-maid in a titled house in London between the wars. She was regarded as posh, and as the arbiter of how things should be done. She always had pastry forks and matching china instead of odd cups and saucers like the rest of the family!
I can remember that she would tick us off if we behaved 'common', and would say 'It's not PROPER!' if we neglected our table manners.
Poor aunt,and her sisters, including my late mother, had been brought up in the most grinding poverty during the 1920's. They all went into service, and the grand houses that they worked in must have seemed like another world.
They were all fortunate in that they went to good houses where servants were treated very well, so they returned home to see their parents much better nourished and more warmly clad than when they had left. Many other girls had bad experiences and were worked half to death and poorly fed.
I don't know what POSH really means - I suppose it's all about perception. If you have nothing, then anyone who is comfortably off would appear posh, but I suppose that having to think about it at all means that we must be 'rather common' as my dear aunt would have said!

DD's best friend,whose father was very high up in the Kenyan government, said that it was years before she realised that most children weren't driven to school in a Mercedes with a flag on the bonnet

My favourite posh people were a titled Lady who used to stride into the room and shake hands saying "Hello! I'n Jonet the spelling mistake!" (her father got her name wrong when he registered the birth) and a lovely family with a beautiful old home, that had been in the family since the Norman conquest, who happily rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in helping their staff when they were entertaining and treated everyone as an equal. Actually they weren't posh at all - they were normal.