Mark my words: It’s not what you say but the way that you say it

He said he preferred tinned salmon to fresh salmon because he came from an impoverished widow’s family in pre-war Leeds, where the height of posh tastiness was tinned salmon.

The first time I read the comment, I realised I had — and still have — the attitude to peaches he had to salmon. I love tinned peaches. I’m not pushed about the hairy real thing, even though there was a period in literature when characters who were about to have sex in a field tended to have lunch first and it nearly always consisted of brie, wine, French bread, and fresh peaches.

I couldn’t count the number of fictional characters who seduced each other through the display of peach juice dribbling down their faces. I never quite understood how someone would find someone else’s peach dribble to be seductive, but maybe that’s because I never got a chance at the whole sex-in-a-field thing either.

By the time Richard Hoggart came to publicly express a preference for canned over fresh fish, he was a professor and bestselling analyst of mass media. He had made it into the Establishment. His position of privilege and influence was never going to be endangered by admitting to such a low-class culinary habit.

He could, and did, talk of his childhood memories of his widowed mother being always “tired and ill”, and he said he could recall the specific day when a small packet of mixed biscuits was brought into his home. Up to that day, he had seen them only in shop windows because the family budget could not stretch to such treats.

“If my mother wanted to cheer us up or get us over an awkward hump or keep us quiet for a while,” he remembered, “she would give us a half-slice of bread, with a bit of margarine and some tinned condensed milk on it. It was cheap, foreign condensed milk and had a special character of its own: The sugar they laced it with somehow hadn’t melted and it had a gritty quality.”

Prof Hoggart’s Proustian evocation of foods characterising his time and class enmeshed a generation when, as book-drunk teenage readers, they fell upon The Uses of Literacy and Speaking to Each Other.

His fame, however, partly rested on evidence he gave when he was a senior lecturer at the University of Leicester, in a court case about banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

He was agin it being banned, describing it as “highly virtuous if not puritanical” .

The statement catapulted him into a status close to stardom. Prof Hoggart, who died recently, scoffed at this. In fact, he said, he simply fitted a niche market.

“I was cast as the northern working-class provincial, now a university teacher; a sort of muted ‘eeh-bah-gum’ figure fit for a short walk-on part,” he observed.

It was the heightened acuity to class, derived from his own background, that led to his groundbreaking exploration of how the non-verbal aspects of communication can deliver potent messages about the social class, the political views and the religious beliefs of the messenger.

But it was his work on what he called “conversational conventions” that is crucial to effective communication. He stated that he could work out whether a man had gone to Eton, Harrow, or other schools based on those conventions.

Well, of course he could, just as we in Ireland can fairly quickly work out, if we try, which side of, say, Dublin City someone comes from, and progress from that point to make a pretty educated guess as to which school and/or college they attended.

Paul Howard’s entire body of work is entertainingly devoted to such conversational conventions, and no committed fan of his central character, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, would believe that Ross attended Joey’s in Fairview or Coláiste Dhúlaigh in Coolock. He’s, like, sooo Southside.

But Prof Hoggart’s insight offers much more than amusement at the dialogue giveaways that (genuinely) provide Mario Rosenstock with his livelihood. Take, for example, the urban legend that, in any of our major cities, young residents applying for jobs falsify their addresses because they know they will not be hired if it’s known that they come from a socially unacceptable area. It would be interesting to establish how many of the job applicants from undesirable areas who put their aunt’s address on the application form actually make it through the process to being hired.

Our recruitment systems are immeasurably fairer than they were when Prof Hoggart was climbing out of the slums of 1950s Leeds. Our educational systems are immeasurably more equitable. Our culture condemns any judgement based on class assumptions. All of which notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that, beneath those worthy assumptions, conversational conventions frequently lead to exclusion of particular candidates. No member of an interviewing panel sits around and says “D’you know what, let’s go for the candidate who started every answer with ‘So -’ any more than they decide not to go for the candidate who says things like ‘J’know, like, I mean?’ No member of an interviewing panel consciously takes such considerations into account.

It’s that word “consciously” that’s important. Most people, when they buy a car, consciously believe they select the model based on rational, measurable factors, whereas all research indicates that they really select it based on subliminal reactions of which they are completely unaware.

Similarly, people within one social group don’t know about the clues to which they react when dismissing another person as unworthy of attention or a job, and if they did, would deny the process is taking place.

We make instantaneous judgements all the time about other people, based on tiny, unacknowledged tip-offs contained in their conversational style, and those judgements are not all class-related.

As canvassers go door-to-door in the next few weeks, they will make those judgements and have them made about themselves in split seconds, after the front door of a house or apartment is opened.

Even if they didn’t announce themselves as from the Green Party, Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, or Labour, most voters could work out their party of origin within seconds, based not on statements of policy but on phraseology. The smarter candidates will work out the affiliations or openness of the people at the door based on the same clues. I remember a seasoned FF canvasser going through some of those clues.

“If they say ‘I’m apolitical’, you know for sure they’re Fine Gael,” he said, and I noted that he used the Fianna Fáil pronunciation, making “Fine” single syllable and rhyming with “dine”, which of course an FG member would instantly spot and understand.

Members of all political parties complain about being interrupted by broadcasters when they’re doing their best to answer the question the broadcaster has put to them.

The interruptive broadcasters maintain they’re cutting through waffle. It might be suggested that, on occasion, what broadcasters define as “waffle” is well-meant use of the language of one in-group colliding with the language of another in-group.