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Isnt there a name for this? Basically you look back in time with a fondness that never existed or at least was very rare. That class you see on TV in old movies/historical documentaries was created via writers and actors. Your everyman on the street wasnt a classy noble knight.
Isnt there a name for this? Basically you look back in time with a fondness that never existed or at least was very rare. That class you see on TV in old movies/historical documentaries was created via writers and actors. Your everyman on the street wasnt a classy noble knight.
It was largely a myth fueled by 1930's movies when the masses wanted to see fancy people on the screen.
Don't think so- not entirely. People dressed and acted better in the past than they do today. Dress and etiquette were actually taught. Anyone old enough to remember social and public behavior even as recently as the 1950's knows this.
Reading the political infighting among Entente and Central powers in the prewar and WW1 era and later the Allies and Axis in WW2 I would say no such thing existed. They were creative with their insults as well. Not vulgar as today.
Don't think so- not entirely. People dressed and acted better in the past than they do today. Dress and etiquette were actually taught. Anyone old enough to remember social and public behavior even as recently as the 1950's knows this.
Yes, I do remember. We had social etiquette classes at school. How to behave around women, be a gentleman, how to eat properly. Plus, it was home schooling. Good manners and proper dress were highly revered back in my country.
Something makes me say to OP - I do not believe every Brit or French was what you describe. Nore was every American NOT what you describe.
I am tempted to say that properly schooled people were like this in every nation. But to be classy, a gentleman in true meaning, one has to grow in that environment. Only in HW movies you take a ****** from a street and he turns into a gentleman in two weeks.
It's the blood thing. Eliza Doolittle is a fiction, you know.
But to grow like this, one has to sort of be in a very specific environment with very specific atmosphere and rather expensive. Aristocracy maybe? As money bags never got there, no matter how many tailcoats and tophats they wore.
Also, if you were to pay attention to what is pushed into minds, actual LACK of good manners is promoted.
But that's in Protocols. "We ruined aristocracy" and anything resembling of it is rooted out.
Isnt there a name for this? Basically you look back in time with a fondness that never existed or at least was very rare. That class you see on TV in old movies/historical documentaries was created via writers and actors. Your everyman on the street wasnt a classy noble knight.
No, of course not. And rare, yes.
But I would disagree with the idea that it was a creation of films. My own glimpses in the Forties and Fifties, and briefly around the mid-Sixties showed me an American world rather like what the OP describes, but it was conservative, not flamboyant and didn't flaunt itself. It was a world behind the closed gates of private clubs, low profile resorts, etc.
Film writers took that world and tweaked it with humor and stereotypes for the popcorn crowd.
Don't think so- not entirely. People dressed and acted better in the past than they do today. Dress and etiquette were actually taught. Anyone old enough to remember social and public behavior even as recently as the 1950's knows this.
Well I'm old enough to remember the 1950's and I don't notice the slightest difference, from a regional perspective, in the least bit. I remember living in New Orleans were as a child if I didn't greet every adult with a gracious salutation a phone call would be made and I would catch hell when I got home. By the same token during the same period when I was in either California or New York with relatives no one gave a rat's behind if I said a damn thing. Now that I live in a particular mid-Atlantic city, people go out of their way to hold doors open, are open and friendly to striking a conversation while standing in line, and other acts of courtesy that you would be hard to come across in other major cities. So it really depends on where you live, the customs of the folks of that area.
But you are right to a certain degree, we know longer teach proper cotillion dancing, or great estate dining to middle and working class youth. It was totally irrelevant in the 1950's and even more pointless now. I find nothing wrong with the great leveling; the dropping of upper class Anglophile pretensions for middle and working class Americans.
For decades upper class Americans strove to prove their "arrival" by adopting the worst aspects of British aristocratic snobbery, completely discarding any pretensions of American egalitarianism. In the late 19th and early 20th century the American 1% of their time sold their daughters off to cash scrapped British aristocrats in order to gain, ironically the illusion of status - as it their wealth wasn't enough - held by impoverished British nobles.
The language used, particularly in texts before the moving pictures era was beautiful. Reading speeches or academic texts or even newspapers from 1900 to 1920 written by those educated from 1870+ one sees the wonderful command of language and ability to paint with words. Does gild topics with a sense of classiness.
Winston Churchill's books are beautiful to read as are some WW1 English memoirs and even Oxford University Press volumes. One does develop a sense of what the OP is indicating. And when you read the private papers or diaries then the ugliness comes out as well as ego and neurosis. I am reading some German High Command correspondence from the WW1 and the insults and infighting are incredible.
Mass-conformity has fallen out of fashion because it doesn't actually accomplish anything - except to inhibit individualism.
Mass-conformity has fallen into fashion! How else do you explain the copycat beards and stubble, the time-consuming hairdos just to look like someone just tumbled out of bed, abundance of tattoos, multi-colored hair, selfies, etc. There isn't a shred of individualism in that.
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