Baking and Books discussion

Here's an article that has the 'truth'!

Sugar Plums

Oh, that's interesting!

"If your mouth was full of sugar plums, it meant that you spoke sweet (but possibly deceitful) words."

There is a phrase, "plummy voiced", here, which denotes someone who speaks with a "posh" accent - from a Northerner's perspective it's most often used to describe a Home Counties, excessively BBC-esque, "Queen's English" or "Received Pronuniciation" way of speaking. More colloquially you'd use it as a pejorative - "speaks wi' a plum int' gob" is how I heard it as a child! implying that someone is putting on a posh accent in order to impress. There's a distinct whiff of both place and class traitordom to it. I've heard it applied to people who've moved from the North to London or Oxford/Cambridge and come back with a new accent/vocabulary/more middle class - and the suggestion that the plummy-voiced one considers themselves too good for their roots.

I'd always assumed it described the sound of the accent, as though someone was trying to speak around a round obstruction in their mouth as opposed to the "flat vowel" sound sometimes used to describe a Northern accent. I guess it comes from sugar plums implying aristocracy (and potentially untrustworthiness!), though!

Oh wow... thank you for posting that. I find this kind of stuff really fascinating. :)

I never knew what a Sugar Plum was but thanks for posting that information

I actually found a bag of sugarplums in a middle eastern grocery. Didn't buy them but they were the discs of honey-colored sugar as described.