How do you define someone as being posh?

I have friends who live in very splendidly squalid conditions who I consider posh. They have friends with nicknames like 'bubbles' and 'squiffy' (Sorry to the person with that username!) grow cannabis in their garden, and are delightfully eccentric.

We have some rather posh friends (well, more than one lot) and all I could say when shown around their rambling but cosy and lovely old house was - 'do you have a cleaner'?

Definitely no cannabis in their garden btw.

Shame. makes dinner time more interesting, that's for sure.

We were not allowed to use the word “posh” (or toilet or serviette or quid) because they were COMMON. There, that’s both threads covered.

Another U here. I was always told you're 'posh' if you break your bread roll with your fingers and not 'posh' if you cut it with a knife
I have friends who are titled, live in a castle and are the least 'posh' people I've ever met. Milk bottle on the table broken down cars on the driveway, bank balance at crisis point. Posh like age is just a word.

I used to cut bread rolls in restaurants until I saw somebody using their fingers and thought it was a very good idea. Never used a knife again. In fact, the older I get, the more I please myself in restaurants. I just ask my friends to excuse me and get on with enjoying the food!

I think this is all tied up with the confusion between class and good manners and etiquette. Not all ‘etiquette’ is based on manners but a set of rules which is supposed to indicate your ‘class’.

So good etiquette dictates that you tear your bread role, squash your peas and don’t put your elbows in the table.

These were considered good manners. But really where do manners come into these examples? Other indicators like not talking with your mouth full I thoroughly agree with.

I think it’s usually only the ‘middle classes’ who care about the sillier edicts on ‘etiquette’ so that they can reassure themselves of their status in the way of the two Ronnie sketch - ‘I look up to him; I look down on him’

PS Wilma I agree it is simply easier to tear a bread roll BTW.

Once saw this in an old etiquette book: "Bite not thy bread but break it".

So I'm being dead non-U when I slice a thick crust off my home-made loaf, spread it thickly with butter and marmalade and sink my teeth into it. Oh, but! the joy of a thick marmalade 'piece'!

Well no Baggs, I think you are being very U by having an unsliced loaf rather than a precut loaf from a supermarket. I think there are modern indicators. U, having an iphone or a very old basic phone, Non U having anything else. U wearing very plain clothes, Non U wearing animal prints.
Any other ideas?

My friend Jo thinks we're posh because we have Lurpak !

Like it, loopy!

If you can afford a second home somewhere like the Dordogne with a 'lady who does' to clean it, that's posh, maybe a swimming pool in the back garden with an 'in' and 'out' driveway, electronic gates and a room called 'the library'.
All the other 'stuff' like washing machines, dishwasher, a car for every adult - all that's fairly commonplace these days.

I've always thought that getting out of the bath to have a pee was posh.

We went to dinner once to a couple who thought they were posh. The lady of the house showed me round, pointing out artwork etc., and saying what everything cost. Now, that's not posh.

When I was a child my friend's mum tried to be posh. Eating dinner there one evening my friend wiped her hands on her dress. Her mum said "Isobel, don't do that. What do you think the tablecloth is for?" That's not posh either!

I have an estuary accent but my friend from the East End thinks I sound posh!!

Interesting word "posh". Seems we tend to use it in an ironic way and it doesn't mean the same as tasteful,up market or U. There is an element of the thing being described as OTT or ostentatious.
It was a word my older sister used to use , haven't heard it recently.

I worked in engineering and music all of my life until I retired at age 70. I've done well and have a nice house with a good company pension but I don't kid myself and don't need a quiz to tell me I'm working class through and through.

If the asparagus is served as a course by itself I use my fingers. If it's just one vegetable on a plate of meat and veg. then I use knife and fork.

DM retired to a little Norfolk seaside town and caused a mild sensation in the post office when she asked for a ball of string to tie her asparagus for cooking.

Mind you, I have had to give up keeping the coal in the bath because with the advancing years it has become too much of an effort to lug it up and down the stairs

Common people keep the sauce bottles in the cupboard, middle class people keep them in the fridge & the upper classes have no idea where theirs are kept - they’d have to check with the butler!

I tend to use the word posh to describe things rather than people. (e.g. a posh meal, a posh restaurant)
If using it for a person I would be mocking them.

One of the girls that I worked with had an aunty who was so posh she wore lipstick when washing the floor!!! That’s me then!

Crooking your little finger while drinking tea is NOT posh! It's what non-posh people think is posh.

In my day everyone was poor the only people that had cars were the Headmaster, doctor and local businessman, but my parents had standards and I was taught to break bread rolls with my hands when eating soup.

We say living room
But g-daughter was making something and said Where’s the butter. Answer In the butter dish Oh how middle class she laughed......