As we have seen, hyper-correction is inscribed in the logic of pretension which leads the petits bourgeois to attempt to appropriate prematurely, at the cost of constant tension, the properties of those who are dominant. The particular intensity of the insecurity and anxiety felt by women of the petite bourgeoisie with regard to language (and equally with regard to cosmetics or personal appearance) can be understood in the framework of the same logic: destined, by the division of labour between the sexes, to seek social mobility through their capacity for symbolic production and consumption. they are even more inclined to invest in the acquisition of legitimate competences. The linguistic practices of the petite bourgeoisie could not fail to strike those who, like Labov, observed them on the particularly tense markets created by linguistic investigation. Situated at the maximum point of subjective tension through their particular sensitivity to objective tension (which is the effect of an especially marked disparity between recognition and cognition), the petits bourgeois are distinct from members of the lower classes who, lacking the means to exercise the liberties of plain speaking, which they reserve for private usage, have no choice but to opt for the broken forms of a borrowed and clumsy language or to escape into abstention and silence. But the petits bourgeois are no less distinct from the members of the dominant class, whose linguistic habitus (especially if they were born in that class) is the
principles of production coincide perfectly.23
In this case, as, at the other extreme, in the case of popular outspokenness on the popular market, the demands of the market and the dispositions of the habitus are perfectly attuned; the law of the market does not need to be imposed by means of constraint or external censorship since it is accomplished through the relation to the market which is its incorporated form. When the objective structures which it confronts coincide with those which have produced it, the habitus anticipates the objective demands of the field. Such is the basis of the most frequent and best concealed form of censorship, the kind which is applied by placing, in positions which imply the right to speak, those agents who are endowed with expressive dispositions that are ‘censored’ in advance, since they coincide with the exigencies inscribed in those positions. As the principle underlying all the distinctive features of the dominant mode of expression,
It is certainly true that, as one rises in the social order, the degree of censorship and the correlative prominence given to the imposition of form and euphemization increase steadily, not only on public or official occasions (as is the case among the lower classes and especially among the petite bourgeoisie, who establish a marked opposition between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary), but also in the routines of everyday life. This can be seen in styles of dressing or eating, but also in styles of speaking, which tend to exclude the casualness, the laxness or the licence which we allow ourselves in other circumstances, when we are ‘among our own kind’. That is what Lakoff notes indirectly when he observes that the kind of behaviour among friends, where someone asks openly about the price of an object (‘Hey, that’s a nice rug. What did it cost?’), which would be acceptable among the lower classes (where it might even seem like a compliment), would be ‘misplaced’ in the bourgeoisie, where it would have to be given an attenuated form (‘May I ask you what the rug cost?’).24
Linked to this higher degree of censorship, which demands a consistently higher degree of euphemization and a more systematic effort to