Pauline Huntington | EMG Editor in chief In my article in the December issue of Gulsori, I promised to discuss some of my family's deviations from "the rules" at our Sunday lunches when I was a child. I put quotation marks around this expression because unlike the rules that make up God's law, the laws of etiquette generally are not set in stone and seem to be open to personal interpretation and preference. I'd like to begin by considering the subject of the ubiquitous napkin; or almost ubiquitous. I always try to limit my use of British English when I write-since most of my readers are more familiar with American usage-and the present subject is a case in point. As I was growing up, it was not "napkins" that were placed on the lunch table, but "serviettes." I had thought this was simply a case of American English versus British English, and it was only when researching this subject in order to write the present article that I discovered the matter actually goes further than this. While it is true that you will only hear British people use the term "serviette," not all British people will do this. In fact, there are some "classes" of society that consider it a complete "no-no." Let me explain.It seems that the members of England's so-called lower-middle class are the ones to blame. Striving to give themselves some kind of more elite status, the people of this class, in an attempt to make themselves sound genteel, came up with certain words that far from achieving this aim, succeeded only in identifying their users as "non-U." (The terms "U" and "non-U" were coined in the mid-twentieth century to indicate "upper class" and "non-upper class.") "Serviette" is one such term. It has been suggested that this word was adopted in the place of "napkin" because it was too close to "nappy" (the British term for the American diaper). It was thought that a fancy French word would sound more refined. The scheme backfired. The lower middle class managed only to provide a further shibboleth* to allow the members of higher classes to more easily identify them. (* Shibboleth : any language usage indicative of one’s social or regional origin. The origin of the word Shibboleth can be found in Judges 12:4-6: Now Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. And the men of Gilead defeated Ephraim, because they said, “You Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites and among the Manassites.” The Gileadites seized the fords of the Jordan before the Ephraimites arrived. And when any Ephraimite who escaped said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead would say to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he said, “No,” then they would say to him, “Then say, ‘Shibboleth’!” And he would say, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right. Then they would take him and kill him at the fords of the Jordan. There fell at that time forty-two thousand Ephraimites.) The British lower-middle class could have saved themselves the chagri

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