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This person Keturah knows a lot less about the east than she thinks she does, and less about the aristocracy too.
In Japan you are expected not to wear your shoes indoors because they’re unclean (I suspect a callback to when most people lived in the countryside and wore sandals made of straw) and also because they will damage tatami grass mats. You might get offered slippers or you might not, it depends on the place. Certainly nobody is going to wash your feet!
As for aristocrats, they/we don’t go on about taking your shoes off, not because people are expected to want to show off their expensive shoes, but because being fussy about hygiene is considered middle-class and gauche. Like having lace doilies or little silver tongs for the sugar or that little tray for the salt and pepper shaker, or pronouncing valet as if it were French. It’s just a barber pole thing.
I’m reminded of the incident where the Clegg family (Lib Dems, middle class with delusions of grandeur) visited the Cameron’s (PM, Conservative, genuine Scottish aristocracy). Mrs. Clegg was horrified to be given a bottle of Heinz ketchup; she gave an interview later saying as much and talking about how at home they make all the condiments themselves. The Camerons were of course silently contemptuous that Mrs. Clegg expected them to earn her approval by hand-making ketchup. Very much a ‘two worlds collide’ scenario.
Aristocrats also have a large degree of separation in their actual living space for hosting guests and parties/events in their mansions compared to your typical home. When your entire hallway is marble flooring and your mansion is capable of hosting 100s of guests and you actually live in an upper floor and you have servants to clean your home and your events likely have dress codes that's completely different from having guests in your home where your carpeted bedroom is right next to your likely carpeted living room. Do you really need to "signal status" if you're just hanging out with your friends?
What's with the entitlement of "being the guest" anyways? Both the host and the guest should try to be respectful of each other. Frankly speaking, if someone is going to get offended when they're asked to remove their shoes, I don't want them in my home. If you think your shoes are cleaner than my floor then you're delusional. In my home we offer slippers for guests.
Easy thing to do is just copy what the home owner does. They keep shoes on, you keep shoes on. They take shoes off, you take shoes off.
Honestly seems to me that Keturah has an ick against taking shoes off for whatever reason and so wrote an entire article trying to justify that.
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As an American: we all pronounce valet as French.
I hadn't realized there's another option.
Yeah, if you watch British shows they pronounce the word rhyming with "mallet". I can only guess that early Americans were trying to be fancy and the pronunciation diverged.
I think early America having a substantial French influence is the more likely culprit.
France was one of the Fledgling US's first allies/trading partners and a good portion of the gulf coast and southern Mississippi watershed had been already been settled by French speakers before being incorporated into the Union.
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Ahh it depends. Your man-servant is valet (rhyming with mallet), when it is to do with cars it is valet (rhyming with ballet).
Oh, interesting. Americans don't have mallet valets, they hire out services, so maybe that's why I haven't heart it.
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Interesting, I hadn't seen the latter case. Thanks for the correction!
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France did help us with that war of independence.
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I feel like I've seen similar phenomena with "guillotine" and "niche." I tried for a while in high school to get people to pronounce the "ll" in "guillotine" like in English instead of like in French, but I gave up because the French pronunciation was too popular. With "niche," that word is niche enough that during the rare occasions it's used, I'm still holding fast to the proper pronunciation of "nitch" instead of "neesch." I recall that, when I was young, "neesch" was kind of a marker of someone trying too hard to sound fancy while actually exposing their own ignorance, but now it seems like "nitch" is becoming a marker an ignoramus philistine who doesn't know that the proper way to pronounce "niche" is "neesch."
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