kippers and curtains saying
Q From Ben Ostrowsky: In a letter to the editor published in the New York Times on 29 September 2008, Lindsay Gray commented: ‘In Britain, we have an expression, “kippers and curtains,” for status-seekers who would bankrupt, even starve themselves, in order to project an image of affluence.’ Can you explain what, if anything, kippers have to do with curtains — and how these are related to status-seeking? A Thank you, and by extension Lindsay Gray, for reminding me of this British working-class expression. Alex Hannaford remembered it in an article about her childhood in the East End of London that appeared in the Evening Standard in September 2003: “There used to be a saying ‘all kippers and curtains’, which meant you bought flashy curtains to keep up with the Joneses, but then you could only afford to eat kippers. Oddly, the term turns up in books about nursing care for the elderly. It is in Rosalie Hudson’s book of 2003, Dementia Nursing: A Guide to Practice, in which she recasts Alex Hannaford’s depiction more formally: “Unfortunately, a significant number of aged-care facilities still fit Brooker’s description of a ‘kippers and curtains culture’.
Such a culture exists when people pretend to be well-to-do by having expensive curtains on the windows, but exist on a diet of inexpensive fish — that is, the outward appearance is not matched by the internal reality.” Apart from these, the expression is not that well recorded, though it was used as the title of a Wednesday Play on BBC Television in 1967 and turned up in June 2008 in an episode of the BBC comedy cop series New Tricks, about a group of ageing ex-policemen in a unit that investigates cold cases. One of the team explained why he hated the trendy London suburb of Notting Hill: “It’s all kippers and curtains, fur coats and no knickers.” (Fur coat and no knickers (knickers is a British term for female underpants) refers to a well-dressed woman whose clothes disguise vulgarity or superficiality, perhaps with a hint that she’s no better than she ought to be, that she’s promiscuous, a bit of a tart.) Kippers and curtains is one of a set of pithy expressions that refer to genteel poverty or a desire to keep up appearances at all costs.
Black as Newgate knocker; Happy as a sandboy; So help me Hannah; Katy bar the door; Support World Wide Words!Select your currency from the list and click Donate. Copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–. Page created 11 Oct. 2008 Problems viewing this page? The English language is forever changing. old ones fall out of use or alter their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least a part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech. World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–. /qa/qa-kip2.htmLast modified: 11 October 2008.Original page Created by Revised: 30 May 2004 © 2001-2004 Hunimex Kft.Separated by a Common Language Wore my red shoes today, which always provides someone with an excuse to exclaim The word is, of course, a dead giveaway that this is a BrE expression. The first 50 or so times I heard it, I assumed it was a comment on the raciness of the colo(u)r red and the type of woman who might call attention to herself (and her feet) by wearing red shoes, but the story is a bit less lady-of-the-evening than it seems at first.
The more common phrase--never applied to me because of my fondness for wool--is . Both phrases are used to refer to someone (or something) that is all flash and no substance. That is, one who's bothered with the decorations, but not with the basic necessities, like (=AmE ). Of course, the moralistic edge of the phrase--encouraging us to have a good foundation (garment) before turning our attention to frills, is often these days overlooked, in favo(u)r of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Search (unfiltered) on Google Image to see what I mean, if you need to. But you don't really need to, do you? Another faintly misogynistic (which is not to say entirely unuseful) phrase that the British have introduced me to is : used to refer to any woman who is unflatteringly dressed in a style that is deemed too young for a woman her age. Better Half also enjoys the phrase , which is to say a woman who is unflatteringly dressed in a way that is too appropriate to her age. (Thankfully, neither of these has yet been applied to me...to my face.)
The British do not have a monopoly on phrases that pass judg(e)ment on the sartorial choices of women. , to refer to the roll of flesh that often appears at the top of some low-slung trousers/pants is an Americanism. This word has made its way into BrE, even though the types of muffins that the phrase alludes to are a fairly recent import to the UK. [Here I must digress. The cake-like American-style muffin seems to have taken over the UK. This is the kind of muffin that a lot of my students think of first when asked to describe muffins--which they are often asked to do in my courses--rather than the type of flat, non-sweet thing that looks like what Americans call an English muffin, but which actually differs from those as well. According to United Biscuits, individually packaged muffins, such as those pictured at the right, are now 'the second largest sector in eat-now cakes' in the UK. But...there has been some semantic slippage in the transfer of this term (and baked good) to the UK: (a) The muffins that are sold in the UK as American-style muffins often lack 'muffin tops' --i.e. the mushroomy bit that has risen over the side of the muffin tin-- so I'm not sure whether the phrase muffin top is quite as evocative here when applied to love handles.
I've yet to come across a home-baked muffin in the UK that wasn't made by me--though one can buy Betty Crocker blueberry muffin mix at Asda, I see. (Not that I want to admit to having been in an Asda--which is owned by Evilmart.) (b) Many of the so-called muffins I see in UK shops are, in AmE terms, cupcakes, as far as I'm concerned. One started to see (horrors!) chocolate chip muffins in the US when I was in my late teens, but to my mind, muffins have to have some whiff of healthfulness about them--bran or fruit, or at least cornmeal--and certainly no frosting. Something built around the theme of a chocolate bar, such as the Galaxy muffin above, is most definitely a cupcake. And before raising the issue of fairy cakes or otherwise taking this conversation any further on the baked goods tangent, please do have a look at the baked goods post from July.] Back to American body-fascist misogyny! Or cultural observation...take your pick! The other AmE phrase that springs to mind (though admittedly not as widespread as the others discussed so far) is sausage casing girl, to refer to someone young and female who wears clothes in a size or two smaller than the sizing lords intended.