Erving Goffman was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable practitioners of social science, a sociologist universally acknowledged for his singular talent. Of course, Goffman was not only concerned with developing a general sociology of interaction and experience. Status symbols identify the social capacity to be imputed to a person in ‘ordinary communication’ and thus how others should treat that person. Unlike collective symbols, which draw persons together irrespective of their differences into a ‘single moral community’, status symbols serve to ‘visibly divide the social world into categories of persons … helping to maintain solidarity within a category and hostility between different categories’ (1951: 294). Goffman is fascinated by the possibility that persons may use status symbols falsely to signify a status they do not actually possess. His writing is concerned with the pressures that play upon behaviour as a result of the fact that a symbol of status is not always a very good test of status’. Only then does Goffman restrict his attention to one sub-set of status symbols: class status symbols.