[luckyjimm]

One of my best friends is a mid-30s corporate lawyer who earns $200k+, is married to a barrister on a similar salary, owns a house in London, and went to one of the best private schools in London, the City of London School for Boys, After university and before he went into practice, he taught law at Oxford. He is from an English/American Jewish intellectual family. He says he's middle-class, not upper class. Funnily enough, according to the English view of the class structure I know what he means.

Another friend of mine, another corporate lawyer in his mid-30s, does not own any property - he rents a flat and lives alone. Until recently he was off work for two years off work due to alcoholism; during this period he had no income. Though he would never say it, he is clearly upper-class. He went to Eton and Christchurch College, Cambridge, and comes from a family with links to the military and to farming / landowning. He speaks incredibly slowly, with dignity, and a clipped upper class accent; even in his cheap clothes, you can see he has the bearing of an Etonian.

My view of what makes you upper class is very much based around where you went to school (in England that doesn't mean university), whether you have connections with the aristocracy, the right parts of the military, or your family were large landowners. It's not to do with how much money you earn in your current job.

Alan Sugar will never be upper class, and neither will the billionaire Philip Green, or Liam Gallagher. Tony Blair himself is middle class.

I can see the problem here. I have another "upper class" friend whose grandfather was an Earl and whose mother is a Lady, whose father comes from a banking dynasty and still owns several country houses and lots of land. But she herself has little money; she lives a bohemian lifestyle living with an artist and their baby in a two-up, two-down house in a poor area many miles from the city centre. In so far as she earns a living, she makes and occasionally sells vases. There's a trust fund she can dip into to buy big things. But does it really make sense to call her upper class, and say that a successful corporate lawyer isn't?

I just wondered how this kind of thing works out in America. What's the distinction between being upper middle and upper clasS?