Word: brahminism
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...Robert Weiss of Harvard's Laboratory of Community Psychiatry accurately observed, "There is one social style in one block and a very different style in another block a couple of hundred yards away." Styles can also change rapidly. In The Late George Apley, Novelist John P. Marquand described a Brahmin who stepped out of his new house in Boston's South End and saw a man across the street fetching his newspaper...
...shirtsleeves. The Brahmin judged, correctly as it turned out, that the neighborhood was on the way downhill; he sold his house immediately...
Originally The Country Club had been founded as a place where Boston gentlemen could congregate for recreation "free from the annoyance of horse railroads." One Boston Brahmin had stated, "The purpose of the Club was that it should be a place for the men of Massachusetts to get away from their women folk...
...with the world's opinion even as he affects to despise accepted mores, is an irritating feature of the book. Crosby's account of easily broken resolutions shows what to Bostonians would be a lamentable lack of moral fibre. However, his accompanying remorse betrays the persistence of those precise Brahmin reflexes Crosby so frequently and noisily repudiated. A man who protests as vigorously as Harry Crosby did against convention and propriety is often trying to overcome a nagging inner fear that perhaps he is just as conventional and bound by the past as the inhabitants of "The City of Dreadful...
...proctor didn't help much, either. Carlo's proctor was a paunch, balding Deerfield grad named Nick who worked in the dean's office; he looked and sounded like Ed Mac-Mahon with a Boston Brahmin accent. Nick used to travel around the country and would lend his room to the preppies on weekends, who in turn used it to entertain young ladies of impeccable breeding and not-so-impeccable morals. Carlo felt very uneasy around Nick, and as Nick felt very uneasy around any outsider who knew what went on in his room over the weekend neither of them...