Tomato sauce and ketchup are not two terms for the same thing.
Tomato sauce is made from tomatoes, oil, meat or vegetable stock, and herbs and spices. Ketchup is made from tomatoes, a prescribed amount of sugar, vinegar and sweet spices.
The top and the bourgeoisie serve neither tomato sauce nor ketchup at the table because it's thought to smother the flavours of good food. In other words, it's not possible to be posh if you ask for either.
A Rave on the Distinctions of Snobbery.
P.O.S.H. = port side out, starboard side home. During the peak of the British Empire on trips between England and India, the best births faced South to catch the warmth of the sun. The term posh evolved its negative connotations due to the boorish and inconsiderate behaviours of the people who could afford the most favoured births. Snobs to an infinite degree, the middle echelons of administration clung with fierce ego and identification to their ideas of etiquette, deportment, pronunciation, taste, culture, religion, politics and all matters of form. They used little clues to sift people through ever finer sieves of discrimination. Ambition and longing for wealth and privilege drove every thought and action of their lives.
They were the Mrs Bucketts of their day.
The people at the top are not posh. Or rather, they keep quiet about the rules and mix freely with others not of their class. Some of their more rebellious children sometimes adventure abroad in the empire, but they have too much money to need to work or to care about prestige or position. They take it for granted - and quite often slum it or join bohemia. It's a different world at the "top" (meaning the landed aristocrats of more than three generations.) They teach their children what's what with absolutist cruelty but will never speak of manners or matters of taste outside the privacy of the family. In other words, you have to be in the know to know. The exception is the servants - they have to know too.
The "top" don't ask for someone to pass things because they must pass everything to everyone without being asked. The polite person will go without rather than draw attention to the lapses of others.
At their table, it's unpardonably rude to point out rudeness, so if you slipped up no one would tell you.
This post was edited by inky at June 22, 2019 7:07 AM MDT
