@plexity: They’re two middle class immigrants(generations aside) who both look down their noses at ‘working class’ be it upper or not, I’d hardly see them duking it out in a pub plexity, mores the pity. It’s actually a feature in North Americas inglorious history…the greasy pole and all that. I’d second your ‘the ever-excellent mind-hacks’(I arrived on that nebulous article by way of Ed Yong ‘I’ve got your missing links right here’ but have read mind-hacks before, have you bookmarked, enjoy your articles and am perfectly aware I’m stoking your ego)

Exactly. This is about social animals developing. Not everything can be made better by ‘caring professionals’.

As the son of a upper-working class family (dad son of mill-girl, he rose to be a qualified mechanical engineer) from the NW of England, I have a different take on this. Northerners (of the normal, not posh variety and not in so-called caring professions) have ‘banter’. This applies equally to males and females. Yes, at the edges it can slide into bullying, or ‘taking down a peg’ and similar deprecated activity, but it is at the core of a bluff, rubbing along with folk, taking a joke, easy social mixing that makes few serious derogatory judgements about people whilst ruthlessly ‘ripping the piss’ on ocassion. And it is particularily present in the teens, until parenthood arrives, when it wanes a little. It’s all about your mates, and you have a lot more mates than you think, as I discovered at the age of 17 when threatened in a pub. When the confrontation ebbed away, I discovered 5 or 6 blokes from my class, lined up behind me, ready to rumble.

I think this is what is being over-egged, misinterpreted and judged here. Maybe we need some anthropologists on the case. Some more ethnography and less sociology. Pah, sociologists.