The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #16872   Message #160116
Posted By: Richard Bridge
08-Jan-00 - 06:43 PM
Thread Name: Meaning of phrase 'Hooray Henry'
Subject: RE: Meaning of phrase 'Hooray Henry'
1. If you are going to assist in defining, please be sure you know what you are talking about.

2. A Hooray Henry may well be a member of a class but is defined by a manner of speech. Not the beautiful modulations of Brian Sewell, or even the tasteful clip of Prince Charles, but an overplayed bray which teeters between being loud (and penetrating, for there is a required tonality) out of an utter awareness of the presence or comprehension of the members of the other classes (the sort of blindness which considers a conversation to be "in confidence" even though servants are there) and doing so in peacocking self-display. Class, in England is not about money but about breeding and speech (and knowing how to dance to "Auld Lang Syne", amongst other things).

3. Diana Windsor (possibly the worst thing ever to happen to an English ruling house except for Oliver Cromwell) was far too much an upper middle class trendy really to be a sloane. Sloanes (from Sloane Street and Sloane Square) tended to be a little too tweedy to be trendy and to wear headscarves folded almost small enough to look like a large bandana, topped with a pear of expensive sunglasses (Carrera would do) shielding not the eyes but the top of the head - like a skier entering a bar.

4. "the hoi polloi" is a gross solecism. "hoi" is the anglicisation of a form of the classical Greek definite article, which in certain circumstances (which I have long since forgotten) take a rough breathing (a slightly breathy sound) before the form "oi". So "the " is a tautology. Correctly one should simply say "hoi polloi"