Defining the Gentleman.

I’m currently engaged in a little bit of banter with somebody on YouTube, and the question has arisen: ‘what is a gentleman?’ (This is all to do with the differences between American and UK conventions with regard to certain words and expressions, and the term ‘gentleman’ has come up in conversation.) Since most of the readers of this blog are either Americans or non-native speakers of English, I thought I might explain that there are at least three definitions in the UK, depending on the situation and the person using it. They are:

1. The formal term for any male personage over the age of majority. I am, for example, always referred to as ‘a gentleman’ (rather than ‘a male’) in reports sent to my doctor from the hospital after investigations or treatment.

2. Any male adult (loosely speaking) who is notably polite, courteous – especially to women – and helpful.

3. (This is the interesting one, the traditional definition): Any male – whatever his temper, habits or predilections – born into an upper class family, preferably one of great longevity and possessed of aristocratic, or at least landed, credentials. And this one brings up the issue of classism.

At the time of WWI, officers in the British army were almost exclusively ‘gentlemen’ of this type. They were seen as the natural leaders, and were often referred to as ‘the officer class.’ They would have gone to a public school, which I should explain is not what Americans call a public school. We call those ‘state schools.’ A British public school is one of a small number of private, select, and very expensive schools which only very rich people can afford, and so anyone who attended Eton, Harrow, Winchester and so on, was marked out as being elevated above the level of ordinary people.

But it also meant that they were relatively few in number, and this became a problem during WWI. So many of them were getting killed in the trenches or no man’s land that the ‘officer class’ was becoming an inadequate source of officers, and the authorities were obliged to lower the goal posts. Young, well educated men from the proletariat were drafted in to fill the dwindling ranks and the officer class didn’t like it. The classic attitude of a traditional ‘gentleman’ to one of the new upstarts is exemplified in the oft-quoted retort:

‘You may be an officer, sir, but you’re certainly no gentleman.’