Word: aristocrat
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...Aristocrat," as used by Americans about Americans, may be the most abused word in American English. This could be the main dilemma facing the redoubtable chronicler of Britain's titled nobility, Debrett's Peerage, which has set out to publish a ten-volume series on the American aristocracy. Debrett's editor, Martin Stansfeld, an untitled Scot who attended Eton and Oxford and whose family "goes back to the Normans," explains that the series will concentrate on "the glittering star system of America's social leadership...
Hemingway made it his happiest hunting ground. Isak Dinesen, in Out of Africa, compared it to England in the 18th century, when an aristocrat might possess a "lovely landscape and a multitude of servants." For Cyril Connolly, however, the East African colony of Kenya was no paradise lost. It was the site of a 1941 murder that obsessed the British essayist and critic for a decade. By the time Connolly died in 1974, he had come tantalizingly close to finding the answer to the question that had mesmerized two generations of colonial society: Who shot Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl...
Enemies-and Godfrey made many, especially among former employees-often labeled the Old Redhead's country-boy manner a fraud: he was born in Manhattan to a mother who was a frustrated concert singer and an improvident father who was a self-styled British aristocrat. Young Arthur dropped out of high school to support the family at odd jobs. He started in radio almost by accident, as a banjo player sponsored by a birdseed company on a station in Baltimore...
...efforts to make sense. An example: "Thus one who lobbies expertly for the rights of female derelicts might be called a shopping-bag-lady knifethrower." He is usually most effective when simplest, writing blunt, mock-macho prose. Recounting in January the confession of a former Communist "mole," American Aristocrat Michael Straight, Safire cracked, "How delicious it must have been for a Red under the bed to deride Joe McCarthy for looking for Reds under the bed." In a column labeled "The Midterm Crisis," Safire counseled: "Mr. Reagan must dispense with his I-am-not-a-shnook defensiveness...
This is a glamour girl in the coyote fur coat, an American aristocrat, the goddaughter of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Cornelia Cochrane Churchill Guest, 19, the youngest child of a socially prominent family, grew up on Long Island and in Palm Beach and New York City. She spent 1982 as a debutante, and all year long the New York gossip journalists mentioned her in print, often dusting off a quaint epithet: deb of the year. "I don't get tired of it," she says, having finished her eggs and her Tab and three more cigarettes cadged from...