Shadowing Practice: what does 'posh' really mean? - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is posh?

What does posh even mean?

This is a really, really interesting word in the English language

because it doesn't really translate outside of English or maybe even it doesn't really translate out of British English very easily.

I really wanted to explore this with you today

i wanted to tell you where this word apparently comes from what it really means how to tell

if somebody is or is not posh we're going to be exploring all of these things today

and am i posh is my accent posh i'm going to tell you why it is

or isn't we're going to be exploring that today.

Hi, my name is Evie and you are listening to the English podcast,

a podcast designed for English learners to help them practice their listening comprehension.

This podcast is designed for you to listen to as you water your plants, while you go bungee jumping,

I don't care, do what you want.

If you are watching this on YouTube, please like and comment, it really, really helps me and

if you are watching on Spotify please leave a review it actually really helps

if you have not done

that already anyway let's get back to this this topic of posh poshness

and being posh all right I think we should probably start with the origins of the word right um

or the alleged origins.

This is where this word posh apparently comes from, but it is disputed.

It's disputed.

So people disagree over whether or not this origin is true or not.

But I think it's a really good story to tell you

because I think it sets you up in the right direction as to what this word means, what are the implications of this word,

what sort of person are we talking about when we refer to something as posh.

We are going back, okay,

to the British Empire where British military men or governors or political officials were going to India,

a colony in the British Empire.

And when you would go to India, you would go by boat.

Okay, you're not flying.

There's no planes.

So people were traveling to India by boat.

And in order to get there, you're going right down by the equator.

The journey was incredibly, incredibly hot.

And the most expensive bedrooms on the boat were on the shady side of the ship,

which would be on the port side going out to India, which I think is the left,

and on the starboard side going back home.

And I think starboard is right, but I have no idea.

Okay.

And this is what the rich people would pay extra to do.

It was almost like first class.

And when they would buy their return ticket,

allegedly it would say on their ticket port outwards starboard home p -o -s -h

posh right it was almost the sign for first class

now this is the rumor um apparently this is contested very heavily people disagree with this

because nobody has found a ticket that says posh port outward starboard home

so it's probably just a rumor

but I thought this was a really good story to tell you

because it really sets the scene as to what sort of person we are talking about

when we refer to somebody as being posh this idea of like British colonialism the idea of Britain as the gentleman's country.

If you are not watching the video, I'm doing quotation signs, okay?

Don't agree with it.

But it has connections to this sort of old British imperial way, okay?

But this word is still in use.

In fact, it's commonly used in the UK.

We will describe people as posh we will describe cafes as posh coffees as posh clothes as posh

so what does that mean nowadays how do we know

if somebody is posh and what are we actually looking for um i know

that when you hear this word as an english learner and And...

If you are listening to this podcast and you are not an English learner, this is a podcast for English learners.

So we're looking at this word from an English learner perspective.

Okay.

It's more about looking at the UK as an outsider,

as opposed to a deep dive into class in the UK.

Like I'm not doing that and I'm not qualified to do that.

And I think that when English learners or when many English learners hear this word posh for the first time,

they think, oh, a posh person is somebody who is either just any British person or somebody who is rich.

And I wanted to debunk this.

I wanted to tell you why that's not true, in particular with this one about money.

OK, so not everybody rich is posh.

And I have an example of two imaginary people to explain who is posh and who isn't.

OK, you could have a old man living in a mansion

that is literally a wreck it could be moldy

it could be damp it could stink it could be full of rats it could be falling down around him

but if his family have owned that mansion for generations like

if his father gave him the mansion and

that was given to him by his grandfather and his grandfather and this guy is called like

Lord Wellington he is posh like

that is a posh man even though he has no money okay meanwhile

you could have somebody who is literally a multi -millionaire

you could have somebody who uh I'm not gonna say billionaire

but you could have like a multi -millionaire right but

that man in a crumbling mansion could look at the

multi -millionaire who maybe grew up in a working -class family

and then gained that money he is not posh he is new money

and this comes down to this really honestly I think

I think this phrase is vile this idea of old money and new money.

Posh people are old money.

They are people who come from, this is another disgusting word, pedigree.

It's people who come from, you know, generational wealth in some way.

And this is kind of what we think of as posh.

Whereas somebody who is new money, they would be maybe looked down upon by posh people

because they were not born with that wealth um

so this is one of the reasons why being posh is not necessarily it's not just somebody who's rich

or something that's expensive or something that is even like designer

or middle class or upper middle class it's it's kind of a little bit more complicated than

that um and actually the other thing that I think English learners think of

when they hear posh is just British people in general

and I find that very interesting

100

because I'm wondering whether they think whether you guys for example think

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that British people are posh compared to Americans or whether the word posh is just associated to Britain in another way.

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And I was thinking about this.

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I think one reason why

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Britain is associated with poshness is because of this idea of like the gentleman's country.

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I think that prevails in a way.

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I also think it's because this word posh, I don't think

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Americans really use it.

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So it's not something that you hear very often in American media.

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I don't know about Canada or Australia, actually, but in America, I feel like they're more likely to say classy,

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fancy, bougie before they would say pash.

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But I am no expert on what

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Americans do or don't do because I've lived in America

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but I'm not an American so I don't know 100 %

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and I think that's really interesting

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because what has now happened is basically a lot of English learners will associate any British accent with

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posh so I've had students send me videos of accents

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that they like in English

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that are actually more considered to be like I don't know more regional accents accents

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that are not in the UK considered to be posh

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but they will send me accents

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that are really really strong such as they'll send me like a pretty strong cockney accent

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and be like oh my god this is so posh I love it

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and I'm like that is not posh you can tell

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if someone is posh by the way they speak a lot of the time um

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and I know

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that a lot of you guys are obsessed with modern RP you like the British pronunciation in particular modern RP

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and that is posh posh posh posh posh like if you meet somebody who speaks English with modern RP,

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they are posh, posh, posh.

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Maybe, I don't know if you can tell, I'm not a very big fan of modern RP.

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I don't really like it very much, but the way you can tell if somebody is speaking modern RP,

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it comes down to a few things really.

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One of them is the way

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that people will say a like an a sound for example in grass you know

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that grows in gardens on the floor the green stuff grass instead of grass

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so modern rp would only ever be grass they would say bath not bath bath

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and they would say i don't know what else

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they would also say their teas um this is something

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that I sometimes do I do this for videos

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and sometimes I drop it it really depends

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but for example let's go for this word

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that people love to say about Brits or at British people

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which is bottle of water okay and when people take the piss out of Brits for this.

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They do something that we call the guttural stop, which is like this bottle of water, a bottle of water.

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I've got a bottle of water.

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You hear how I'm not saying the T in the middle, but somebody who is RP,

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she would say a bottle of water, a bottle of water.

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Uh, and she hits the T.

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She hits the T and people who speak RP will always, always hit the t it's not super common as an accent

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because it's typically the pronunciation used by a lot of like elites in our country

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so people who went to private school were privately educated through private

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or public schools and i'm going to explain the british education system later

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but people who have enough money to go to private school

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are more likely to speak with this kind of pronunciation right

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so we've covered a little bit like what is what is like posh

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it's people who come from money basically it's people

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that come from money they have sort of family ties they probably went to private school

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and something that's really key is they're probably probably probably going to have the modern rp accent

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so am i posh am i posh because I know a lot of people, this is a really big compliment,

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but lots of people compliment my accent.

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And I get lots of comments of people saying, I like your British accent.

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I want to learn the modern RP accent.

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And I found that really interesting

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because I don't have a modern RP accent in my opinion um in my opinion

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I have like a very generic southern English accent

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and I think it's fairly close to modern RP like it's close

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I'm not gonna lie it's close um a lot of and speak more clearly in these videos.

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So typically I would say like, but all better, get on.

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Like I do it all the time and that's not very posh.

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I do say bath, I think, but I'm from a place called Cornwall where we say like bath and grass.

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And if I'm in Cornwall, I change my accent a little bit to say like bath or grass or, you know, my accent changes

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when I'm home only a tiny bit it's not a big change

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but it changes a little bit when I'm home compared to when I was living in London for university

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But I don't believe that my accent is super posh.

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Somebody with a thicker regional accent might think that my accent is posh.

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Like a Southern English accent, like I said, it's very, very close to modern RP.

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So I do think many people would consider my accent to be posh compared to like Glaswegian up in Glasgow.

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um not that a scottish accent cannot be posh it's not just modern rp

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that is posh it's more than that

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but i really wanted to talk about this um

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because it's interesting for you guys i think

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but also i gotta i gotta hate comment

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and you know i get hate comments

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i just delete them like i don't whatever there's a thing on youtube you might not know this

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but if you leave hate comments the creator can just like block you

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and I recently had a video go viral on like just regular

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YouTube so I made a video of me speaking at like native speed right it was for my students

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because I changed the way I speak for you guys

188

so for my 100k special I filmed a video of me speaking without changing my speech.

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And I got a lot of attention from people who are not English learners.

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And I got one comment and it really bugged me.

191

And he said, I can't believe that people are learning English from this state school educated tramp.

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I can't believe people are learning English from this state school educated tramp.

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And that's because this guy, who is probably incredibly posh, thinks that my English is working class.

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He thinks that my English is not refined.

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He thinks that my English is like uneducated.

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And he's a he's a but he's not wrong.

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I did go to state school, whereas a lot of posh people will have gone to private schools and been privately educated.

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And this is kind of one of the big divides between posh

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and not posh is the way that you were brought up

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and how much access to money that your family had

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and things like this but he could tell that I was not posh

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because I say like when I speak

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because I'm 25 you know I'm not like a 60 year old man in my rotten rat infested mansion

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oh it actually offended me but anyway um I'm 25

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so I have a younger way of speaking and part of that is I say like all the time.

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It's kind of a bad habit, but it's what I do.

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And it is not very posh.

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But I hope that if you hear my accent and you like the way I speak, this is another accent in the UK that is very,

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very common and it's not modern RP.

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If you learn a really, really good modern RP accent, it does slightly have this connotation of being posh,

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of being maybe a bit privileged or a bit like snooty.

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You might be somebody that looks down on people.

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I'm not saying that is what all posh people are like.

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I have posh friends and they're lovely.

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But that is always going to be the first impression

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that this kind of modern RP accent gives off is this idea that you are somebody that is very,

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very classy and refined and posh and you come from money.

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And, you know, that's just kind of what the accent is like.

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I am going to film an extension for this podcast

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so I mentioned a little bit in this video state school

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and private school and these are the different education systems

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that we have here in the UK

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and I am going to be explaining these speaking at here we go native speed

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so I'm going to be filming a podcast extension where I

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just basically speak without trying to be clear for anyone

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I'm just going to speak normally not in like teacher talk

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which is what I'm doing right now if you would like to watch

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that it's going to be over on my school over on Evie's English Club

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which I will link down in the description

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I just made this school about a month ago and we've been running live classes.

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I have a course on there.

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We have speaking events as well and a book club.

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There's loads over there, but I also film extensions to these podcast episodes at native speed.

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The majority of my audience here on YouTube has an English level between B1 and B2.

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So everything over on my school is to help you move beyond B1

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and B2 and reach C1

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because I think comprehensible input it will get you to B1 B2 that's fine

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but if you want to go further than

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that you need to work more you need to work on specific things

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and that's what my school is for basically so

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if you would like to get involved over there I would love to have you

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and anyway that's enough promotion I think I just wanted to say to you thank you

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so much for watching this video once again and I'm so excited to see you in the next video bye

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “what does 'posh' really mean?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: posh, accent, english, somebody, modern. This video has 243 sentences and 2907 words to shadow. The speech runs for 21:13. The speaker talks at a steady 137 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
accent noun	/ækˈsɛnt/	A higher-pitched or stronger (louder or longer) articulation of a particular syllable of a word or phrase in order to distinguish it from the others or to…
podcast noun	/ˈpɑdˌkæst/	A program, especially an audio program, produced on a regular basis, delivered over the Internet in a compressed digital format and designed for playback on…
bath noun	/bɑːθ/	A tub or pool which is used for bathing: bathtub.
grass noun	/ɡɹɑːs/	Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as…
mansion noun	/ˈmæn.ʃən/	A large luxurious house or building, usually built for the wealthy.
educate verb	/ˈɛd͡ʒ.əˌkeɪt/	To instruct or train.
extension noun	/ɪkˈstɛnʃən/	The act of extending; a stretching out; enlargement in length, breadth, or time; an increase.
compare verb	/kəmˈpɛɚ/	To assess the similarities and differences between two or more things [“to compare X with Y”]. Having made the comparison of X with Y, one might have found it…
associate noun	/əˈsoʊʃi.ət/	A person united with another or others in an act, enterprise, or business; a partner or employee.
incredibly adverb	/ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/	In an incredible manner; not to be believed.
explore verb	/ɪkˈsploɹ/	To examine or investigate something systematically.
millionaire noun	/ˌmɪl.i.əˈnɛə(ɹ)/	Somebody whose wealth is at least one million (10⁶) currency units (usually understood to exclude holders of hyperinflated currencies).
pronunciation noun	/pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/	The formal or informal way in which a word is made to sound when spoken.
refer verb	/ɹɪˈfɜː/	To direct the attention of (someone toward something).
whereas	/(h)wɛɹˈæz/	In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
come down to verb		To reach by moving down or reducing.
go back verb		To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
bring up verb		To mention.
fall down verb	/fɔl ˈdaʊn/	To fall to the ground. To collapse.
get back to verb		Return to (an activity)
give off verb	/ɡɪv ɒf/	To emit; to produce and send forth; to come across in some manner.
look down on verb		To regard or treat as inferior.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

I don't care, do what you want.
I've got a bottle of water.
I have posh friends and they're lovely.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	somebody who is · somebody who uh · people who come
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is designed · is disputed · is contested
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have not done · has found · have owned
Past continuous was/were + -ing — an action in progress at a moment in the past	were traveling · was thinking · was living

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 61 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: bath /bɑːθ/, grandfather /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌfɑðɚ/, thick /θɪk/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: mansion /ˈmæn.ʃən/, extension /ɪkˈstɛnʃən/, associate /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/, pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, promotion /pɹəˈmoʊʃn̩/
Long words — get the stress right: associate /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, millionaire /ˌmɪl.i.əˈnɛə(ɹ)/, pronunciation /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like accent, podcast, bath.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: what does 'posh' really mean? - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?