Having lived in York for almost eight years now, I consider myself as a northerner by adoption. My pronunciations of 'grass' and 'class' are faultless, I like chips and gravy, I talk disparagingly about soft southerners who panic at the merest sprinkling of snow. But there's one supposedly northern trait I can't quite accept.
As my job involves answering phone calls, I come across this quite a lot. And that is probably part of the problem, since on the phone it's difficult to judge if someone is being patronising or just friendly. Especially when they have a heavy accent (Yorkshire is fine, and I'm getting the hang of the varieties of the Newcastle/ Durham area, but sometimes it's just too much.). Can you tell what it is yet?
It's the northern tendency to describe the person they're talking to as 'luv' or similar.
I've heard this tendency described (by both southerners and northerners) as 'endearing' and 'friendly' and I'm sure that much of the time that's how it is intended. The trouble is, most of the people describing it in that way are male. If you're a young female and are being described as 'darling' by someone who is older and acts as if he's incredibly superior to you, it's not quite the same as when a middle aged lady is helpful in a shop. I don't mind the latter kind. What I object to is when the speaker is being partonising. I got called 'darling' about seven times in the course of a minute long phone call yesterday. If that's friendlyness, it's excessive to the point of creepy when it's from a man I don't know.
It's worse if it's at work. I have to be polite, which is seen as encouraging. I can't challenge patronising behaviour. I can't even report it to senior staff- what can I report? A client was overly friendly? I felt uncomfortable? I'd just get told to grow up/ calm down, unless it was serious enough to claim sexual harrassment- and it's not, really. Sometimes it's genuine friendliness which I may have just misinterpreted, sometimes the person patronising might not be aware of how they're coming across.
But sometimes it is genuinely patronising. Perhaps it's less of a northern thing, and more of a class thing. Because I am a receptionist, typically a low skilled and low paid job. A lot of our clients are people who are pretty well off- business owners, professionals. And although by no means universally, some people do seem to regard me and people like me as unworthy of equal treatment. Class may not be determined by birth, but it is often, on an every day level, determined by money.
